I think of your face while I get up, while I move in the darkness from bed to window, clothes lying around the floor like unfinished thoughts. The face that my memory can conjure up with its rough outlines and fine details, with the gray-blue eyes the same color as the Baltic Sea in winter. What I am certain of is this: my body feels depleted, like a foreign country after a war.

Maybe it was the ghosts of these noises, swept up by the wind, carried across the ocean to knock on my consciousness. Not the branch of the chestnut tree knocking against my window, not Pani Kolecka coughing in the room next door. (Everything passes, even the longest of vipers.) Read moreĪs to the action which is about to begin, it takes place in Poland-that is to say, nowhere.

Lyrical and sensual, immersive and intense, Tomasz Jedrowski’s indelible and thought-provoking literary debut explores freedom and love in all its incarnations. Shifting from the intoxication of first love to the quiet melancholy of growing up and growing apart, Swimming in the Dark is a potent blend of romance, postwar politics, intrigue, and history. Their secret love and personal and political differences slowly begin to tear them apart as both men struggle to survive in a regime on the brink of collapse. Ludwik is drawn toward impulsive acts of protest, unable to ignore rising food prices and the stark economic disparity around them. Once they return to Warsaw, the charismatic Janusz quickly rises in the political ranks of the party and is rewarded with a highly coveted government position. But in their repressive Communist and Catholic society, the passion they share is utterly unthinkable. Inhabiting a beautiful, natural world removed from society and its constraints, Ludwik and Janusz fall deeply in love. After their camp duties are fulfilled, the pair spend a dreamlike few weeks in the countryside, bonding over an illicit copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. But a chance meeting by the river soon becomes an intense, exhilarating, and all-consuming affair. When university student Ludwik meets Janusz at a summer agricultural camp, he is fascinated yet wary of this handsome, carefree stranger.

Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of Communism, a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide-a stunningly poetic and heartrending literary debut for fans of André Aciman, Garth Greenwell, and Alan Hollinghurst. Tomasz Jedrowski is a remarkable writer.” - Justin Torres, bestselling author of We the Animals “Captivating both for its shimmering surfaces and its terrifying depths. “Imagine Call Me By Your Name set in Communist Poland and you'll get a sense of Jedrowski's moving debut about a consuming love affair amidst a country being torn apart.” - O, The Oprah Magazine

Swimming in the dark