Granny’s family were forced to leave their land. At the end of the war, the east of Germany became Poland and the east of Poland became the Soviet Union. From one day to the next, the continent’s borders had shifted, redrawn like the chalk lines of the hopscotch we played on the pavement.
Everyone – the people who’d lived here before and the people who replaced them – had been forced to leave their home.
Our postboxes still said ‘ Briefe’ in German. It hadn’t even been twenty years since any of our families had come to live there. There were hedges and wide courtyards with a little garden for each flat, and cool, damp cellars and dusty attics. He lived around the corner from us, in our neighborhood in Wrocław, composed of rounded streets and three-story apartment buildings that from the air formed a giant eagle, the symbol of our nation. I had known him almost all my life, Beniek.
He speaks five languages and writes in English. He was born in Germany to Polish parents, and has lived in several countries, including Poland, and currently lives in Paris, France, where he works in high-fashion. Tomasz Jedrowski is a graduate of Cambridge University and Université de Paris. To order As If By Chance, Swimming in the Dark or Plume go to following is excerpted from Swimming in the Dark, the first novel by Tomasz Jedrowski. Wiles takes aim at our self-absorbed, social-media-obsessed generation with real wit, even as an ominous plume of black smoke acts as an ever-present memento mori for his deeply flawed characters. His protagonist, Jack Bick, is a hard-drinking east London journalist who has to interview a series of frauds, from a literary novelist he suspects of having faked his own mugging to an estate agent with a morally dubious scheme to shake up the London lettings market. Will Wiles’s hugely entertaining third novel resembles nothing so much as a Nathan Barley for the Brexit generation, and is as dark and uproarious as that sounds. Jedrowski writes elegantly and evokes the emotional honesty that the lovers first thrive in, and then the grimly repressive machinery of the PUWP. The two have very different views of the Polish United Workers’ Party, and these distinct visions of the state threaten to destroy everything. In 1980 Poland, a love affair begins between Ludwik, a closeted and anxious young graduate, and the more worldly Janusz. Tomasz Jedrowski’s debut novel is an affecting and unusual romance, with a political undercurrent. But he is never bound by chronology, instead dealing with his work thematically and impressionistically. The acclaimed former artistic director of the Young Vic begins these lyrical reminiscences in South Africa, chronicling his sexual awakening and emerging interest in the stage.
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