About the authorExcerptJulita and the Swings is an appealing novel of manners aimed at a wide readership. In telling a story about unrequited love it presents an account of provincial Poland and the social and political changes that took place in the period from 1956 to 1989. This book can be read on several different levels and is likely to attract a wide range of readers. In it the narrator, a middle-aged, rather unfulfilled writer, struggles with his awareness of his own life’s failures. The most dramatic, crucial element in his fractured biography is his unrequited love for a friend from his schooldays. This is very ancient history, but meanwhile we are in the 1990s: the writer arrives in his hometown to make spiritual contact with the era of his youth. He decides to write a novel about his generation, about a group of his contemporaries born in and around 1956. This opens up the book’s broadest plane, the one concerned with social mores, encompassing the ordinary events and extraordinary incidents that happen to a dozen or so people representing a wide variety of social and psychological types. Two more themes are wound into this narrative, one about the remote and typical Polish provinces, and one about communist Poland. The book has yet another layer, which one might call magical, about the deeds and history of the title character Julita, an angel-girl gifted with supernatural powers.
There are more than 28,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 200 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
