Olanda

Thus speaks the narrator of Rafał Wojasiński’s novel . Awarded the prestigious Marek Nowakowski Prize for 2019, introduces us to a world we glimpse only through the window of our train, as we hurry from one important city to another: a provincial world of dilapidated farmhouses and sagging apartment blocks, overgrown cemeteries and village drunks; a world seemingly abandoned by God — and yet full of the basic human joy of life itself. Our English translation of , which includes the radio play , brings one of Poland’s great contemporary writers of fiction to the wider world for the first time. These narratives may not contain the entire world, just like a village at the end of a dirt road running through ponds, that floods after a heavy rain, does not contain all that may be found in Warsaw. But the world they contain is an intriguing one, in which everyone, from aging beauties through gravedigger philosophers, defrocked seminarians and even the occasional politician, is welcome. Translated from the Polish and introduced by Charles S. Kraszewski Publishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor