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Light

Timothy O'Grady

2004266 pagesabout 4–6 hours
2004
first published
  • 2004Secker & Warburg · 266 pages · ENGISBN 9780436206429
  • 2012Penguin Random House · 272 pages · ENGISBN 9781448129980
  • 2013Penguin Random House · 272 pages · ENGISBN 9780099584070

An elderly Pole sits in a cafe in Krakow. At another table a young man with a ravaged face is drinking wine and reading. They begin to talk. All through the night as they go from bar to bar the young man tells the story of the great love of his life, of how in the midst of their rapture the woman inexplicably disappeared, and of how he is now driving across Europe in a desperate attempt to find her. After they part in the pre-dawn light the old man returns to his rooms and finds himself beset by questions. Why can he not forget this young man? Who was the woman he was with and why did she leave him? These questions lead him back through his own life, from pre- and post-war Poland, to his membership of the Communist Party and his own life-altering love affair with a woman he met in Berlin and then ran away with to the sand dunes of the Baltic coast until she, too, left him without explanation.

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