Author(s): Nathan Nielsen

Australian Fiction

Set amid Kraków's enchanting beauty and the grimy legacy of Poland's communist past, this is a story of cultures and pasts colliding, and the things born from such collisions.Matthew Campbell, a thirty-year-old Australian who's hung up on a past love, chooses to teach English in the Polish city of Kraków for another year. In those last, ephemeral days of Autumn 2006, he meets Viktoria Tondera, a single mother grappling with her own troubling affair. One embedded in the brutality of Poland's hooliganism. Faced with this violent undercurrent that threatens to rupture the life they have started, Matthew must decide how much he is willing to risk to keep the three of them safe. Poland, along with everything he has found love and meaning in, could slip through his hands, forever.Poignant, poetic, evocative. This is a timeless tale imbued with opposition: beauty and tragedy, elegance and depravity, care and harm-and all that hangs in the balance. Ultimately, it is a story about the universal value of love, and what we are willing to do to protect those in its name-no matter the cost.