ABOUT
THE BOOK

The town of Nowa Ruda and its surrounding countryside is a place of shifting identities. Polish now, it has been German, Czech and Austro-Hungarian among other nationalities in the past. Here, at the heart of Europe, where borders move and languages and their speakers come and go, ordinary lives are not as simple as they appear. When the narrator and her husband settle in the area, she soon discovers that the locals all have their secrets. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic elderly neighbour, she gathers their stories, moving back and forth in time and between truth and myth, disentangling the events of their days from the dreams of their nights.