White Nights

White Nights, the debut short story collection from poet Urszula Honek, is a series of thirteen interconnected stories concerning the various tragedies and misfortunes that befall a group of people who grew up and lived in the same village in the Beskid Niski region in southern Poland.

Each story centres itself around a different character and how they manage to cope, survive, or merely exist despite, and often in ignorance of, the poverty, disappointment, tragedy, despair, brutality, and general sense of futility that surrounds them.

Urszula relates to us with the sincerest care and honesty a localised, yet so clearly universal, story of ruin and hope: a story where the protagonists do not ask to be understood but merely to be seen and to be heard.

Endorsements

Kate Webster’s brilliant translation of Honek’s poetic, yet often earthen, prose brings us to places that, though they are seldom seen in literature, we may never forget. — Kate Webster