Olanda

"I've been happy since the morning. Delighted, even. Everything seems so splendidly transient to me."

So begins Olanda -- or rather, so speaks its narrator, a man wandering the roads and woodlands of a small Polish town, losing and regaining his sight, breathing in the smells of fried pork chops and steamed potatoes, holding on to life without quite knowing what it is.

The world Rafał Wojasiński gives us here is the one most of us pass through without stopping: provincial Poland, glimpsed through a train window between important cities. Dilapidated farmhouses. Sagging apartment blocks. Overgrown cemeteries. Village drunks. A place that looks, from a distance, as though it has been quietly forgotten -- by history, by progress, by God himself. Up close, it is full of people: aging beauties and gravedigger philosophers, defrocked seminarians and occasional politicians, each carrying the full weight of an ordinary life.

Winner of the prestigious Marek Nowakowski Prize (2019), Olanda is a novel about the texture of existence in a small place, written with lyrical precision and a deep, undemonstrative tenderness. It does not claim to contain the whole world. It contains something better: a world that is entirely itself.

This English edition includes Old Man Kalina, Wojasiński's radio play, which extends and deepens the novel's vision of provincial life and its quietly extraordinary inhabitants.

Translated by Charles S. Kraszewski, whose previous translations of Polish literature for Glagoslav include Adam Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve and A Burglar of the Better Sort by Tytus Czyżewski. Published with the support of the ©POLAND Translation Program.

© 2026 GP Audiobooks (Audiobook): 9781804842874

Translators: Charles S. Kraszewski

Release date

Audiobook: May 11, 2026