Changes

|title=The Madonna on the Moon

|sort=Madonna on the Moon, The

|publisher=Atlantic Books

|date=November 2013

|summary=Its length, woolliness and unusual subject surely make this novel hard to recommend universally.

}}

Things are certainly strange in the small rural town of Baia Luna; all the stereotypes one would suspect in a newly-Communist mountain village are turned on their head. People vocally feel free to dismiss the Soviet changes and technology, but secretly at the dead of night enter the fields to try and hear the sounds of Sputnik blipping its orbit overhead. Gypsy men willingly get baptised into the ways and religions of their ''gajo'' neighbours. The most forceful character is a teenager called Fritz, best friend of narrator Pavel, and son to an ethnic German photographer. Part of Fritz's power seems to rest on him knowing a lot more than others about the village schoolteacher – enough, perhaps, for her to disappear overnight?