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Prize-winning reportage from Albania - a polyphonic account of life under Enver Hoxha's regime, in arguably the most brutal totalitarian state of all
About the author
Malgorzata (Margo) Rejmer (b. 1985) is a graduate of cultural studies at the University of Warsaw. In 2009, her first full-length novel, Toksymia, was published. In 2013, she wrote Bucharest: Dust and Blood, for which she was nominated for Polityka Passport in 2013. Mud Sweeter than Honey is her fourth book. She is now working on a follow-up reportage about contemporary Albania.
Summary
"[An] incredibly moving collection of oral histories . . . important enough to be added to the history curriculum" Telegraph
"Essential reading" History Today
"A moving evocation . . . An illuminating if harrowing insight into life in a totalitarian state." Clarissa de Waal, author of ALBANIA: PORTRAIT OF A COUNTRY IN TRANSITION
"Albania, enigmatic, mysterious Albania, was always the untold story of the Cold War, the 1989 revolutions and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mud Sweeter Than Honey goes a very long way indeed towards putting that right" New European
After breaking ties with Yugoslavia, the USSR and then China, Enver Hoxha believed that Albania could become a self-sufficient bastion of communism. Every day, many of its citizens were thrown into prisons and forced labour camps for daring to think independently, for rebelling against the regime or trying to escape - the consequences of their actions were often tragic and irreversible.
Mud Sweeter than Honey gives voice to those who lived in Albania at that time - from poets and teachers to shoe-makers and peasant farmers, and many others whose aspirations were brutally crushed in acts of unimaginable repression - creating a vivid, dynamic and often painful picture of this totalitarian state during the forty years of Hoxha's ruthless dictatorship.
Very little emerged from Albania during communist times. With these personal accounts, Rejmer opens a window onto a terrifying period in the country's history. Mud Sweeter than Honey is not only a gripping work of reportage, but also a necessary and unique portrait of a nation.
With an Introduction by Tony Barber
*Winner of the Polityka Passport Prize**Winner of the Koscielski Award*
Translated from the Polish by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Additional text
This outstanding record of recollections of those who lived through it makes for chilling reading . . . It is impossible to imagine a title that better captures the squalid and sinister horror of life in Albania under communism
