In these eleven stories Pawel Huelle shows his master craftsmanship as a teller of beautiful, evocative stories. Though each tale is independent, they all share a setting on the Baltic coast, whether of Poland or of Sweden, and they all feature a large, significant book, whether it is the Bible or a homeware catalogue. They cover a wide range of genres, including black comedy - such as Gendarme Polanke's Fifteen Shots of Vodka, in which the gendarme drinks, while in parallel scenes the homeless woman he has terrorised on the road is exposed to the elements; mystery - such as Oland, in which an enslaved shepherd on a remote Scandinavian island encounters a strange and powerful magus who shows him the way to salvation, or Doctor Cheng in which a man encounters a Chinese mystic who reveals to him the secret of his wife's sudden death; and real events - such as The Bicycle Express, in which the narrator recalls the excitement of the days when he helped deliver news bulletins from the striking dockyard at the height of the Solidarity union, or The Flight to Egypt, where an artist tries to befriend a beautiful Chechen refugee and her suspicious husband.

    As usual in Huelle's writing, the stories have several time scales and layers, cleverly woven together in retrospectives. Some of the stories show how the past influences the present, as if time overlaps and events happen in parallel, such as Franz Carl Weber, in which a Polish man goes to claim the fortune his father won decades earlier in Switzerland, or Ukiel, where after many years in South America a man returns to his native Poland, to his disappointing relatives but also the spirit of his dead wife. The stories are also united by themes that echo strongly through the whole collection, such as love,  displacement and nostalgia for the past. They are equally linked by the powerful imagery and lyrical style that are the hallmarks of Huelle's prose.

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.