The new novel, 'Say Goodbye to Breakfast!' coming soon...
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'a seductive and irresistible read' (Independent on Sunday)
A magical novel set in several cities across Europe.
"Whoever had the choice would choose an eagle's nest on the cliffs instead of a home." (Juliusz Slowacki)
Is it possible to fully comprehend a person when you don't grasp the intricacies of their culture, when you don't share a homeland or a voice, when you have different definitions of the past and conflicting commitments in the present? What future is there for love when you find yourself the other side of language -- a place where everything feels slowed down, reduced to gestures, as if under water?
When Joseph meets Marta, he is captivated, and when she returns to her native Poland, he follows her. His subsequent journey, across a continent, through the cold and dark of an unfamiliar country, meeting all sorts of characters, and culminating in KRAKOW proves as much a search for understanding -- of a person, a place, a language -- as it does a struggle against isolation.
Meanwhile, perhaps to give herself strength in difficult circumstances, Marta is researching the forgotten histories of remarkable women from across Europe - an actress, an attempted assassin, and a philosopher-nun: Lya de Putti from Hungary (pictured above) who became the most famous actress of the silent screen in 1920s Berlin having left her husband and abandoned her two children but struggled thereafter with her guilt and heavy drinking; Edith Stein, who was born into a Jewish family in Breslau (now Wroclaw), converted to Catholicism, only to be murdered in a concentration camp; and Fatima Kapla, the attempted assassin of Lenin.
Interlinking Joseph's often strange experiences with Marta's letters to him (which provide brief but richly suggestive accounts of the lives of the women mentioned above), Winter Under Water is a book of Europe, of myriad identities, of love and language, of intimacy and exile. It is also, ultimately, a book that suggests you only truly know a person or a place when you can sit in silence and not feel compelled to break it -- in any language.
''We have abandoned each other...and since we continue to live we ought to meet again, for we were Life.'' (Endre Ady)
'spiky, lively...[the novel] powerfully suggests the sense of a frozen, submerged state of being and the faltering attempts at overcoming differences in language and culture' (the Guardian)