Malwina, a girl endowed with extraordinary sensitivity, dreams dreams and war memories of her grandmother, which causes her to function in two parallel realities – the war (mainly the one from the Borderlands and Siberia) and Poland in the 1990s. The realities interpenetrate and overlap. Malwina, the dream catcher of her grandmother, who survived the war, becomes a kind of dybbuk giving voice to the dead; for her, the war continues on both the night and day fronts. Powerful, moving, well-constructed prose.
Despite the title, the caravan of this story it never stops, and I, the reader, believe Marta Hermanowicz, because although she inherited these stories from someone, she twisted them epically for us, today. “The End”, the author’s debut, is the most moving novel our new twenties.
– Piotr Siemion
Layered secrets of the lost farms, deportations and work logging taiga, death, broken ties and everyday life keep us in emotional tension. I would like to find out that after many years the trauma goes away and the heroines can be happy. Strong, wise, prose filled with life details.
– Inga Iwasiów
– winner of the main prize at the 11th International Short Story Festival (2015) for her short story Pure Leo and winner of the literary competition “Nothing is what it is” at the Góry Literatury festival (2020). She published in “Twórczość”, “Pisma”, “Czas Literatury”, “Fabularia” and the weekly “Polityka”. She graduated in political science from the University of Szczecin, as well as the Tadeusz Gadacz School of Philosophy and art history at the Institute of Fine Arts of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Collegium Civitas.