`A masterpiece ... a moving image of post-war Poland, and the first breathing of one of the essential voices of the twentieth century... the master of literary reportage` The Times Literary SupplementWhen the great traveller-reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski was a young journalist in the early 1960s, he was sent to write about the farthest reaches of his native Poland. The resulting essays brought together here reveal a place as strange as any of the distant lands he visited on foreign assignments: caught between ties to the past and dreams of escape, a country on the edge of modernity.`Kapuscinski trascends the limitations of journalism and writes with the narrative power of a Conrad or Kipling or Orwell` Blake Morrison