Nine

'A major work of modern fiction... He's an accomplished stylist with an eye for the telling detail that brings characters and situations to life... Like the Dublin of Joyce's Ulysses, the city itself becomes a central personality of the book... I caught a flavor of Hamsun, Sartre, Genet and Kafka in Stasiuk's scalpel-like but evocative writing' - Irvine Welsh, New York Times Book Review

One of a number of cult writers to have emerged from post-communist central Europe... Stasiuk's prose has the easy flow of Kerouac's

Politicises the everyday so compellingly that it calls to mind the greatest work of John McGahern

A blistering existential thriller of dodgy deals and foresaken ideals

Harnessing the shape-shifting, paranoid ambience of Kafka, not as a means to pass comment on totalitarianism but on the void (political and social) created in its wake ... impressive for the quality of its prose (Stasiuk is fantastic at listless, urban desolation)...a rewarding despatch from a country undergoing enormous change

Paints a vivid and disturbing picture of contemporary life in Poland...offers a sobering vision of the new face of central Europe in a narrative that is at once hallucinatory, haunting and abject

A brilliantly written, if dark and sombre, tale of life in Warsaw in the nineties...a must read

Born in Warsaw in 1960, Andrzej Stasiuk has risen to become one of the most important and interesting writers at work in Eastern Europe today. Author of over a dozen books and winner of many prizes, he came to writing in an unusual way: in the early 1980s, he deserted the army and spent a year and a half in prison for it. Afterwards he wrote a collection of short stories, The Walls of Hebron, about his experience, which became a huge success. He and his wife, Monika Sznajderman, run a small publishing house in Czarne.

Pawel, a young Polish businessman, is in trouble; in debt to loan sharks his only hope lies with former friends, many of whom are now prominent in Warsaw's drug-dealing underground. Embarking on a desperate fool's-gold chase through the city's grimy apartments and creaking transport system Pawel struggles for survival as part of a generation adrift in moral space and disconnected from family, neighbours and friends. 
 
Nine is a brilliant novel from one of Europe's finest writers: both an existential crime novel and a major work of literature.

Andrzej Stasiuk

Michael Kandel

A eulogy for the old Europe, the Europe both in and out of time, the Europe now lost in the folds of the map, On the Road to Babadag is valuable reading for UK readers. If we can't read our way around Europe, how will we ever find our place, our identity, within it?

Stasiuk's journeys are vivid poetry... What formally also underpins Stasiuk's travels, and rather beautifully embodies his resistance to the future, is how his prose communicates the working of memory, mirroring its inconsequentiality. His accounts are fragmented, shuffled, continued later or not. Time breaks down as it is past; in his mind events cover space and time in an even, translucent layer

The emptiness, the disconnectedness and the stasis deep inside Europe can be as emotionally transfixing and revelatory as the tumult of a city crowd on the Indian subcontinent. There are still places that insist the human condition is timeless... His eye is keen and his commentary as rich as they are throughout... The burgundy passports of Europe have spread across the region since this book first appeared in 2004. Time is on the march after all, and now English readers can enjoy the rewards of Stasiuk's entrancing attempt to stand in the way of progress. It's an exceptional writer who can rise to such an impossible challenge

A Kerouac-style amble from the Baltic to the Adriatic

Stasiuk captures this "other Europe" with clarity and eloquence as he charts his journeys through Albania, Moldova, Slovenia and elsewhere

He is a self-consciously hard-bitten writer (whose career began when he was jailed for deserting from the Polish army) with a self-conscious hard-bitten style. His journeys are measured out with beers and cigarettes; his evenings with hard liquor... Stasiuk follows his 'perverse love for the periphery, for the provincial' as he traverses the outer edges of the former Austria-Hungary to the little Romanian town of Babadag... Lurking beneath his romanticism is an appreciation of the conflicting realities

Much of the power and originality of Stasiuk's book derives from this inversion of the ostensible purpose of travel, his methodological destruction of the simplistic teleology of the tourist, mirrored in a prose which is at once powerful, punkish, angry, and disorientating in its quest to probe into Europe's dirty laundry

Stasiuk is one of Poland's best-known contemporary authors and On the Road to Babadag is a welcome addition to his growing English-language corpus... Unfailingly stimulating and ably translated by Michael Kandel

Travels in the Other Europe

Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveller. His journeys - by car, train, bus, ferry - take him from his native Poland to small towns and villages with unfamiliar yet evocative names in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine. Here is an unfamiliar Europe, grappling with the remnants of the Communist era and the arrival of capitalism and globalisation. 
 
'Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin,' he wonders, as he is being driven at breakneck speed in a hundred-year-old Audi - loose wires hanging from the dashboard - by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. And so his journey continues all the way to Babadag, near the shore of the Black Sea, where he sees his first minaret.

Andrzej Stasiuk

Praise for On the Road to Babadag

A eulogy for the old Europe, the Europe both in and out of time, the Europe now lost in the folds of the map, On the Road to Babadag is valuable reading for UK readers. If we can't read our way around Europe ...

This book has a peculiar charm and power

Stasiuk's journeys are vivid poetry... What formally also underpins Stasiuk's travels, and rather beautifully embodies his resistance to the future, is how his prose communicates the working of memory, mirroring its ...

A eulogy for the old Europe, the Europe both in and out of time, the Europe now lost in the folds of the map, On the Road to Babadag is valuable reading for UK readers. If we can't read our way around Europe ...

This book has a peculiar charm and power

Stasiuk's journeys are vivid poetry... What formally also underpins Stasiuk's travels, and rather beautifully embodies his resistance to the future, is how his prose communicates the working of memory, mirroring its ...

A eulogy for the old Europe, the Europe both in and out of time, the Europe now lost in the folds of the map, On the Road to Babadag is valuable reading for UK readers. If we can't read our way around Europe ...

This book has a peculiar charm and power

Stasiuk's journeys are vivid poetry... What formally also underpins Stasiuk's travels, and rather beautifully embodies his resistance to the future, is how his prose communicates the working of memory, mirroring its ...

Books by Andrzej Stasiuk

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