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The darkly comic tale of three generations of a Jewish family, from one of Poland's most renowned contemporary authors.
Confidential follows on the success of acclaimed photographer, psychologist, and writer Mikołaj Grynberg's highly acclaimed short story collection, I'd Like to Say Sorry, but There's No One to Say Sorry To, which was a finalist for numerous awards, including Poland's most prestigious literary prize, the Nike, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the National Translation Award in Prose for Sean Gasper Bye's excellent translation.
This powerful new novella is a darkly comic portrait of a Jewish family in today's Poland, struggling to express their love for one another in the face of a past that cannot and will not be forgotten. The grandfather is a doctor, a Holocaust survivor who has now vowed to live only for pleasure. His son, born at the start of the war, becomes a well-respected physicist, but finds himself emotionally unable to attend the medical conferences in Germany, despite the benefit it would give his career. The mother is loving but firm, though she has a secret habit of attending strangers' funerals so that she can cry.
A masterpiece of concision, Confidential expands on one of the stories in I'd Like to Say Sorry . . . , tackling themes of memory and care, trauma and memory, as well as enduring anti-Semitism, with unforgettable power, emotional complexity, and Grynberg's trademark black humor.
"A deeply humane portrait of a Polish Jewish family in the decades after WWII... . This powerful novel is not to be missed." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Haunting, bitingly funny... . Grynberg brilliantly composes his fiction with a photographer's eye... . A beautiful family portrait—intimate, poignant, multi-generational—confronting the inescapable legacy of surviving (for some) the grievous Holocaust." —Shelf Awareness
"Mikołaj Grynberg's writing is the art of context, able to take daily life and reveal the abyss within, to show ordinariness beginning to cast apocalyptic shadows." —Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate and author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
"Mikołaj Grynberg's work stands out for its wit, beauty, and insight, and you can't find a more brilliant and committed translator than Sean Gasper Bye. Confidential is a stunning book." —Jennifer Croft, author of The Extinction of Irena Rey
This information about Confidential was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mikołaj Grynberg is a photographer, psychologist, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. He is the author of Survivors of the 20th Century, I Accuse Auschwitz, and The Book of Exodus as well as I'd Like to Say Sorry, but There's No One to Say Sorry To and Confidential, translated by Sean Gasper Bye (The New Press). He lives in Poland.
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