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  • Published: 15 April 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099468622
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $28.99

Nine



'A major work of modern fiction... He's an accomplished stylist with an eye for the telling detail that brings characters and situations to life... Like the Dublin of Joyce's Ulysses, the city itself becomes a central personality of the book... I caught a flavor of Hamsun, Sartre, Genet and Kafka in Stasiuk's scalpel-like but evocative writing' - Irvine Welsh, New York Times Book Review

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.

  • Published: 15 April 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099468622
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $28.99

About the author

Andrzej Stasiuk

Born in Warsaw in 1960, Andrzej Stasiuk has risen to become one of the most important and interesting writers at work in Eastern Europe today. Author of over a dozen books and winner of many prizes, he came to writing in an unusual way: in the early 1980s, he deserted the army and spent a year and a half in prison as a result. The resulting collection of short stories, The Walls of Hebron, was a huge success. He and his wife, Monika Sznajderman, also run a small publishing house in Poland, Czarne.

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Praise for Nine

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

A brilliantly written, if dark and sombre, tale of life in Warsaw in the nineties...a must read

Evening Herald

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

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