A collection of short stories which elevate the events from the narrator’s childhood and youth to a mythical plane, thus lending to perfectly ordinary things extraordinary meanings.
It turns out that everyday life is rich in secrets, full of omens and signs which can and must be deciphered. As the stories unfold, they form a family saga which takes place mostly in Gdańsk and Żuławy and Kaszuby, the surrounding countryside of varied and complex history. It is as much the history of these places that is told, as the lives of the people who used to inhabit them and then moved, and those who succeeded them and settled for good, whether out of their own free will or out of necessity.

Paweł Huelle is a novelist and poet. He was born in Gdańsk in 1957 and graduated in Polish Philology at the University of Gdańsk. He worked as a university lecturer, journalist and director of the Gdańsk Polish Television Centre. Honoured with many prestigious literary awards, Huelle is one of the most successful contemporary Polish writers.
His first novel Who Was David Weiser (1987) was hailed by the critics as “the book of the decade,” “a masterpiece” and “a literary triumph” and has been published, among others, in Germany, Spain, France and Finland. It is a story of a mysterious disappearance of a Jewish boy during his summer vacations. Many years later Dawidek’s friend sets out to investigate the events that came to shape his entire life. The novel has been described as a coming-of-age story, an adventure novel or even as a philosophical treatise.
Like Who Was David Weiser, Huelle’s next two books Stories for a Time of Relocation (1991) and First Love and Other Stories (1996) are set in his home town of Gdańsk and its environs, even though they are concerned with different historical periods and social milieus.