The Boarding House

Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. In this debut novel by the Polish writer Piotr Pázinski, a young man takes a train to a small town outside of Warsaw to visit a boarding house populated by the last generation of Polish Holocaust survivors. When his grandmother was alive, he had spent a great deal of time at this boarding house, and now he returns, as if to get one last glimpse of the past—to look at old faces and think old thoughts. Pázinski’s narrative is at once dreamlike and hard-nosed, and it is structured with the haunting simplicity of a fairy tale. The Boarding House is a meditation on the sad, sometimes terrifying moment when living memory becomes history and the living become the dead.