Paweł Huelle Book order

A student pedals an old Ukrainian bicycle between striking factories delivering bulletins in the tumultuous first days of the Polish Solidarity movement; a shepherd watches, unseen, as a strange figure disembarks from a pirate ship to bury a chest on the beach; a prisoner in a Berber dungeon recounts his life's story--the failed pursuit of the world's very first language--by scrawling in the sand on his cell floor. The characters in this mesmerizing short story collection find themselves, willingly or not, at the heart of epic narratives. Against such backdrops as the Baltic coast, Kashubian folklore, Chinese mysticism, and the 9/11 attacks, this book centers around the vision of the refugee: be it the Chechen woman carrying her newborn child across the Polish border, the survivor of the Gulag reappearing on his friends' doorstep, or the stranger who befriends the sole resident of a ghostly Mennonite village in the final days of World War II. Offering insight into Polish and Jewish sociopolitical history, this collection is written in the style and traditions of Polish literature.

In the Polish city of Gdansk, narrator Pawel recounts his driving lessons from the early 1990s, shortly after the fall of communism.

Weiser wasn't just anyone - the other boys were sure of that. Even animals seemed to obey the scrawny boy. Then came the revelation of his arsenal at the disused brickworks which promotes him from Jewish outcast to local hero. This novel won the Independent Foreign Fiction Award.