Miss Nobody

Marysia Kawczak is a fifteen-year-old girl growing up in the grey flatlands of Poland, where she feels she is predestined to become--like her mother--a house-slave, "a 210-pound lump of fat with varicose veins." At the age of fifteen, Marysia moves with her parents to the nearest big city. It is here that she meets two streetwise girls, Kasia and Eva, who--each in her own way--begin to teach her the secrets of life. Marysia's drab life suddenly gains color, as she discovers not only the ostensible ways of the world, but also the subtler experiences of love, sex, desire, passion, and--finally, in the novel's breathtaking conclusion--betrayal. Combining elements of straightforward contemporary fiction, the metaphysical, fairytales, and the epic, richly layered styles of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Mann (to whom many international critics have compared him), Tomek Tryzna has made an astonishing literary debut.