A collection of thirteen interwoven short stories all set in the same village in southern Poland, each centred on a different villager and how they cope with the tragedies that life throws at them.

I know I’m in the minority on this one - I’ve only seen enthusiastic reviews of it, whereas I just found it…fine. I love a bleak book, but this was so very bleak and at times felt generically so - every possible terrible thing happened. Ironically, most reviews talk about the strong sense of place, but I wasn’t really struck by that - to me it felt like it could be any desolate, godforsaken village, which I guess makes the collection “universal.”

I don’t think I can overstate how miserable life is in this village - death is omnipresent in every story and it feels like nobody can really escape the poverty and disappointment that hangs over everything. It’s a book of despair rather than hope, barely eking out a living rather than defiant survival in the face of inevitable tragedy.

What I did really enjoy is the way the stories interconnect - together, they paint a (depressing) portrait of the village, with previous and future characters popping up across the stories. Honek wove the threads between the various stories very cleverly, allowing for a richer development of the various characters and their back stories, and as a reader, it’s satisfying to make the links between characters and events, because they’re not always obvious.

A bleak collection of cleverly interconnected stories about existing in the face of poverty, tragedy and despair, which I just didn’t quite click with.