Shortly after the Bulgarian perestroika, three young men barely into their 20s climb into a bus for Paris to steal cars. For decades, their town on the shores of the Black Sea had been a popular vacation spot amongst their Communist brethren; now it’s just a suburb where waiting for change has taken on the features of boredom. No one believes in the magic formula, Fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall any more. Lucky, Marco and the String Bean have different dreams, but the three decide to tempt fate together. They picture France like in Louis de Funès’s films, and their last illusions about the free world won’t hold for long. From squats, department-store security guards, the Refugee Office waiting room, the supermarket and the Arab-grocery-store to their first stay in prison, what they learn with sorrow and indifference from this new Europe is what it is to be a foreigner.
Hot wiring, forgery, false license plates… car stealing is a craft. Their early fears and successes, crossing borders… Savov keeps the story moving at a fast pace. After the euphoria, and a few setbacks as well, a question keeps coming back obsessively: what’s the point? What’s the point of accumulating more and more if you have no one to share it with? “No women on board,” his accomplices keep telling Lucky, who has fallen hard for a café au lait woman… quite a change for someone who couldn’t even cope at first with those oh-so-foreign foreigners, the Blacks, the Arabs... He winds up letting that girl get away, but in the end, love will save him: a sweet Mary, who was running away from home, hitchhiking. Love, and writing too.

A fresh and lively novel about an immigrant-from-the-former-Eastern-bloc-countries.