Description: LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
In a village in the remote countryside of southern Poland, it's as if the poverty and brutality emanate like mist from the cursed dirt. The thirteen interconnected stories in White Nights tell of families, scarred by tragedy but also by each other. Whether by digging a pond deep in the woods, taking a lover, raising a family, or simply trying to get ahead of the endless work as the thunder rolls over their home, Urszula Honek's characters share, with the sincerest care and honesty, a local--yet so clearly universal--story of ruin and hope. Kate Webster's blazing translation of Urszula's poetic and earthen prose brings us to places seldom seen in literature, where the people do not ask to be understood, but merely to be heard.
Brief description: Kate Webster translates from Polish into English, specializing in literature, the arts and academia. She has translated many short stories and essays for publication in anthologies and online and, in September 2018, took part in the Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme organized by the National Centre for Writing, where she was mentored by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Her first book-length translation was a translation from the Polish of Mapa by Barbara Sadurska, published by Terra Librorum in 2022. Her translation was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2023.
Review Quotes: Longlisted for the International Booker Prize
Winner of the Witold Gombrowicz Literary Prize
Winner of the Kościelski Award
Shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation
"White Nights is astonishing. Its power is cumulative; as one story follows another, a net tightens around the small town in which its characters live, breathe, work, and die. Honek affords her characters the dignity of their own wrecked lives, which she sketches so vividly that their pain leaps from the page. A short story collection with the impact of an epic. I will remember this book for a long, long time."--John Darnielle, author of Devil House
"White Nights is a dark, lyrical exploration of the ways in which people seek meaning and belonging in a transient world."--International Booker Prize judging committee
"White Nights is a spectral and affecting novella-in-stories that illumines postwar life in an out-of-the-way Polish village."--Foreword Reviews
"Honek with complete cruelty, but also mastery, symbolically kills her influences. She stands firmly on her own two feet, moving readers with her own voice - immediately clear, set and full."--Paulina Malochleb, Empik Critics' Choice
"White Nights, is akin to reading an account of a haunted place - one that is beautiful and devastating in equal measure. . . . Though firmly categorizable as literary fiction, my eerie detector prickled at the dreamlike, latent danger threading through these interconnected chronicles."--Jennifer Brough, Litro Magazine