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Awards: Marek Nowakowski Prize for the best short story collection 2021
Awards: - Year
- 2021
- Pages
- 186
- ISBN
- 978-83-63518-49-3
Moving portraits of modern-day Poles, told through five short stories, which reveal the intricacies and complications within people’s lives
the story of the single mother left with two children; the multiplicity of voices of mourners at a funeral, where death is depicted as an experience that unites people. There is also a short story about a frail old man, missing his daughter, who has moved abroad. The scenes depicted by Kudyba have been overheard on a bus, on a tram, on a train, on the underground and in the street. The realism and authenticity of the reality in this most recent work by the author of Pułascy [The Pulaskis] are the book’s greatest strengths. The tragic, bitter, yet sublime, fates of ordinary citizens here become a testimony to the heroism of everyday life. The wide range of difficulties with which the characters in And Then What? have to contend reflects those modern heroes who struggle with real life.
Paulina Subocz-Białek, translated by Halina Maria Boniszewska
