The novel portrays four young people living in a totalitarian police state in Communist Romania, ending with their emigration to Germany.

[1] Like many of Müller's books, The Land of Green Plums illustrates the position of dissidents from the German minority in Romania, who suffered a double oppression under the regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu.

The rural German-speaking community tries to preserve its culture by enforcing traditional rules; once the main characters escape this environment through university study in the city, they suffer, as political dissidents, the oppression exercised by the totalitarian regime.

Normal human relationships are rendered impossible by the lack of freedom of expression; the threat of violence, imprisonment, and execution; and the possibility that any personal friend may be a traitor.

Written in a paratactic style, full of flashbacks and time shifts, the language of the book reflects trauma and political oppression.

In 1998 this translation won the International Dublin Literary Award, the largest prize given for a single work of fiction published in English.

[2] Following the announcement that Müller was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, The Land of Green Plums entered the bestseller list on Amazon.

Soon after, the narrator shares Lola's diary with three male friends, Edgar, Georg, and Kurt; Lola's life becomes an escape for them as they attend college and engage in mildly subversive activities—"harbouring unsuitable German books, humming scraps of banned songs, writing to one another in crude code, taking photographs of the blacked-out buses which carry prisoners between the prison and the construction sites.

"[4] The four are from German-speaking communities; all receive mail from their mothers complaining about their various illnesses and how their children's subversiveness is causing them trouble; all have fathers who had been members of the Nazi SS in Romania during World War II.

Like her narrator, Müller comes from the German-speaking minority in Romania, the Banat Swabians, with a father who had been former SS man during World War II.

Ms. Muller's vision of a police state manned by plum thieves reads like a kind of fairy tale on the mingled evils of gluttony, stupidity and brutality.

"[12] Critics have recognized Müller's writing as political, "as a form of manifest resistance against totalitarian claims to power," and have studied her "complex and ambiguous imagery.

"[12] Critics have generally shown appreciation for the novel's language, as did Nicholas Lezard, writing in The Guardian: The prose, while simple at the level of the sentence (and we can safely assume that Hofmann's translation is very faithful to the original), is shifty, blurred, to the point where at times we are left unsure as to what exactly is going on – a deliberate flight from causation, quite understandable in a country where everyone (even, we learn, the horses) has been driven mad by fear.

"[5] One critic argues that "Herztier was written in response to the trauma of life under the Ceauşescu dictatorship, when the citizens of Romania lived in constant fear of the secret police or Securitate.

The first of these is Lola, the friend who supposedly kills herself; her testimony is preserved in her diary, in which she wrote of her animalistic sexual exploits with nameless men and her struggle to cope with the guilt of having joined the Communist Party in an effort to better herself.

By the late 20th century, their status is one of the central themes of The Land of Green Plums; this idea is explored in detail in Valentina Glajar's 1997 article "Banat-Swabian, Romanian, and German: Conflicting Identities in Herta Müller's Herztier."

Following persecution after the war, while remaining survivors had no desire to emigrate to Germany, they exerted an almost totalitarian control, especially on their children to keep them within their community.

[5] Müller had already addressed this topic in her first work, Niederungen, translated as Nadirs in English, in which the German community holds on to its language and habits in an attempt to deny the Romanian dictatorship that rules them.

[20] According to Glajar, this is the world of the narrator's mother, who writes of her sicknesses in her letters in the hope of keeping her daughter emotionally connected to her home village.

Rolf Michaelis reviewed the novel at length in Die Zeit in October 1994, analyzing the function of fear and praising the book as a "poetic epic", comparing transitions and structure to those found in Homer.

[26] Larry Wolff, in his review for The New York Times, described the book as "a novel of graphically observed detail in which the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania".

[12] Radio Free Europe reported that the novel is a favorite of Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, the Iranian pro-democracy activist, who read it (in the Persian translation by Gholamhossein Mirza-Saleh[27]) shortly after being released from prison in 2009.

Set in Communist Romania under the Ceaucescu dictatorship, The Land of Green Plums portrays the lives of a group of dissident students and teachers whose integrity is continuously assailed and sometimes betrayed.

The "green plums" of the title stand in part for truth and its brutal suppression in a world of interrogators and informers, where speaking out can become a matter of life and death.

[31]The International Dublin Literary Award drew attention to the novel,[32][33][34] and by the end of the year, it had been published in paperback in the US by Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press.

During the presentation ceremony, Anders Olsson, member of the Swedish Academy, referred to The Land of Green Plums as "a masterful account of the flight of a group of youths from the terror regime".