One of a number of cult writers to have emerged from post-communist central Europe... Stasiuk's prose has the easy flow of Kerouac's
New Statesman
Politicises the everyday so compellingly that it calls to mind the greatest work of John McGahern
- Joseph O'Connor,
A blistering existential thriller of dodgy deals and foresaken ideals
- Boyd Tonkin, Independent
Harnessing the shape-shifting, paranoid ambience of Kafka, not as a means to pass comment on totalitarianism but on the void (political and social) created in its wake ... impressive for the quality of its prose (Stasiuk is fantastic at listless, urban desolation)...a rewarding despatch from a country undergoing enormous change
- Claire Allfree, Metro
Paints a vivid and disturbing picture of contemporary life in Poland...offers a sobering vision of the new face of central Europe in a narrative that is at once hallucinatory, haunting and abject
Publishers Weekly
Pawel, a young Polish businessman, is in trouble; in debt to loan sharks his only hope lies with former friends, many of whom are now prominent in Warsaw's drug-dealing underground. Embarking on a desperate fool's-gold chase through the city's grimy apartments and creaking transport system Pawel struggles for survival as part of a generation adrift in moral space and disconnected from family, neighbours and friends.
Nine is a brilliant novel from one of Europe's finest writers: both an existential crime novel and a major work of literature.