Man in Shadow

Translated from the Polish by Stephanie Kraft
TK-page paperback / 5" x 8" / ISBN 9781589882270
Publication Date: 8/3/2027

A blend of crime fiction and psychodrama, this is the first English-language edition of Eustachy Rylski's award-winning novel

“He was at odds with himself, though less as years went by, because things happened without his participation―because life ran along beside him and he stood on the bank, not so much helplessly as idly watching its current.”

Aleksander Rański, an attorney in his mid-thirties, lives with his mother in Warsaw, where his boredom with his job and his personal life eats away at him. He expected more civic improvement after the fall of Communism two years earlier, and his disillusionment, along with his love-hate relationship to his Russian heritage, leads him to accept a position with a Russian-connected mob boss who runs a trucking company in the city. Before long, driven by his inner emptiness, Rański beings to exploit his boss's paranoia and fabricate a drama with himself as the star―a drama that explodes out of his control in this fast-paced, atmospheric thriller.

Eustachy Rylski is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter who was born near Nowy Sacz, Poland in November 1944, two months after his father was killed in World War II. In 1984, at age 39, he published his first work of fiction, Stankiewicz.The Return, which won a wide readership. He turned to writing plays and gained acclaim with works for television. With his wife he founded the elegant women’s magazine Twój Styl (Your Style). In 2004 Rylski published Man in Shadow (Człowiek w Cieniu), his first novel in twenty years, and one of several that have brought him national and international recognition. His works have been translated into Italian, German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Spanish, Russian, and Czech, among other languages. Famous for his dictum that good writing takes not only talent but wisdom, Rylski also told Polityka, “I'm one hundred percent certain that my work hasn't unraveled the mystery of existence. From time to time, however, I try."

Stephanie Kraft is the author of No Castles on Main Street and the translator or co-translator of three Polish novels, Stone Tablets by Wojciech Żukrowski, Marta by Eliza Orzeszkowa, and The Homeless by Stefan Żeromski. Kraft was a newspaper reporter and freelance writer for forty years and travelled annually to Poland for more than thirty years. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.