New book: “Dadzieja” — Anna Jadowska

New book: “Dadzieja” — Anna Jadowska (Czarne Publishing)

Date and time: 23 March 2026, 7:00 PM
Place: Foyer of the New Theatre / Nowa Księgarnia, Warsaw
Admission: free
The conversation with the author will be led by: Michał Nogaś

A hot summer in the countryside somewhere in Lower Silesia in the 1980s. Two sisters meet a stranger on a sunbaked asphalt road. He gets out barefoot from a white car and watches them strangely. A few days later, the body of a murdered girl is found in the forest.

But this is not a crime story. The literary debut of a well-known screenwriter and director is a novel about girls growing up, shadowed by both excitement and fear. A perpetually irritated mother has no time for her daughters, neighbors eavesdropping at the kitchen door tell unsettling stories, fathers — each sister has a different one — have long disappeared, and all men, on closer look, are grasping and capable of violence.

“Dadzieja” is also a moving portrait of a sisterly bond — inseparable though rough, filled with rivalry and brief moments of closeness. It is cinematic in its intensity, full of sensual images and frozen shots in which an apparently ordinary summer shimmers like a oneiric, unsettling projection of growing up.

Anna Jadowska — screenwriter and director. She studied Polish philology at the University of Wrocław and the Łódź Film School, where she currently teaches. She made her literary debut in 1996 in “Brulion” and also published in the magazine “Rita Baum”. “Dadzieja” is her first prose book.

Michał Nogaś — radio and press journalist, deputy editor-in-chief of Program 3 of Polish Radio, author of the book “Z niejednej półki. Wywiady”.

Cycle illustration: Jarosław Danilenko