'A masterpiece ... a moving image of post-war Poland, and the first breathing of one of the essential voices of the twentieth century... the master of literary reportage' The Times Literary Supplement

When the great traveller-reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski was a young journalist in the early 1960s, he was sent to write about the farthest reaches of his native Poland. The resulting essays brought together here reveal a place as strange as any of the distant lands he visited on foreign assignments: caught between ties to the past and dreams of escape, a country on the edge of modernity.

'Kapuscinski trascends the limitations of journalism and writes with the narrative power of a Conrad or Kipling or Orwell' Blake Morrison

Ryszard Kapuscinski (Author)
Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in Poland in 1932. As a foreign correspondent for PAP, the Polish news agency, until 1981 he was an eyewitness to revolutions and civil wars in Africa, Asia and Latin America. His books include The Shadow of the Sun, The Emperor, Shah of Shahs, Another Day of Life and Travels with Herodotus. He won dozens of major literary prizes all over the world, and was made 'journalist of the century' in Poland. He died in January 2007.