Vera Verdiani Books

'The most passionate, engaging and historically profound account of the Soviet empire that I have read.' - Michael Ignatieff

Just out of university in 1955, Kapuscinski, the novice reporter, told his editor he'd like to go abroad, dreaming no farther than Czechoslovakia. Instead he was sent to India. Kapuściński gives us the non-Western world through virginal Western eyes.

A psychologist arrives at a research space station called Prometheus, his mission to ascertain whether research into the mysterious planet of Solaris should be terminated. He finds Prometheus all but deserted, its straggling crew seemingly haunted by hallucinations of figures from their pasts.

In November 1942, Bruno Schulz, teacher of drawing and handicrafts at a boys' college in Drohobycz, was shot dead by a Gestapo officer as he brought home a loaf of bread.