Ferenike, recently published by Humanitas, was launched at the Târgul Internațional Bookfest, in the presence of the author and her guests. The novel, which quickly became a bestseller, ranked among the top-selling titles, according to AGERPRES.
The first autobiographical novel by Doina Ruști, Ferenike explores the theme of death, starting from a real-life event: a murder that took place in the 1960s.
Emphasizing fabulation, Doina Ruști creates a work of fiction in which the title becomes a semantic node with multiple meanings: from the ancient figure of Ferenike to a formative teenage encounter with this character. The novel rises toward deeper aesthetic meanings, advocating for the triumph of storytelling and the power of literature. Pheréin nikē means “to triumph,” and Ferenike becomes a symbol of writing as the only certainty in a transient world.
Alongside other major titles, Ferenike by Doina Ruști ranked in the TOP 10 best-selling books published by Humanitas:
Radu Paraschivescu, În virtutea inepției
Mircea Cărtărescu, Seven Strange Years. Journal 2018–2024
Doina Ruști, Ferenike
Robert D. Kaplan, The Tragic Mind (trans. Iustin Mureșanu Ignat)
Ioana Pârvulescu (ed.), Letters to the Readers of 2125
Tatiana Niculescu, Saint No. 6
Alberto Basciani & Cristina Brăgea, Romania after World War I
Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Illuminati: From Secret Society to Conspiracy Theories (trans. Alunița Voiculescu)
Gabriel Liiceanu, The Second Life of My Books
Catherine Nixey, Heresy (trans. Radu Cucuteanu)
The novel moves fluidly from realism into fantastic territory, following not chronology but the emotional meaning of events: how a murder committed in 1968 continues to reverberate through 1980, 1990, and 2025.
Written in a simple style, with glides into the fabulous and into black humour, Ferenike is not a novel about communism, but about the way trauma, guilt, and memory shape female identity across decades. It is the story of a woman learning to live with absence, with unanswered questions, and with the demon Ferenike—until the day she comes face to face with her father’s killer.
The novel was published by Romania’s leading publishing house, Humanitas, in 2025, and was compared by România literară to Yorgos Lanthimos’s film The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
More details are available via AGERPRES
