Seemingly a collection of prose ballads about a mythical village facing the trauma of 1990s-style economic transformation, the book gradually reinvents itself as a novel. Considered one of Poland's leading contemporary writers, Stasiuk brilliantly blurs the line between genres as he explores the fissures in existence where there is often little difference between the living and the dead, death and sleep, dream and reality, the real and the televised, and between civilization and nature.