Nine

Description

'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 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.

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.

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 * New Statesman * Politicises the everyday so compellingly that it calls to mind the greatest work of John McGahern -- Joseph O'Connor A blistering existential thriller of dodgy deals and foresaken ideals -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent * 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 -- Claire Allfree * Metro * 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 * Publishers Weekly *