As a young woman, Róża lost everything that mattered to her: her homeland, an early love, and her career as a violinist. Doomed to feel everywhere a stranger, she nursed dreams of grandeur and vengeance that shadowed the lives of her husband and children. Now in her 60s, Róża visits her daughter on one disastrous day that will bring all the wounds and clashes of the past to the fore - and, perhaps, offer a hope of change.With great psychological depth and vividly metaphorical language, Kuncewiczowa constructs an indelible portrait of a frustrated artist and ambivalent mother. Capricious, manipulative and moved by a titanic rage, Róża is the captivating and horrifying centre of this rediscovered classic of European fiction.



Maria Kuncewiczowa (1895-1989) was a Polish writer and novelist. She was born to Polish exile parents in Samara, Russian Empire, and the family returned to Warsaw when she was a small child. She studied literature and music in Kraków, Warsaw and Nancy and pursued a literary career, working on translations of fiction with the Polish PEN Club, with which she would maintain a connection throughout her life. Kuncewiczowa first came to prominence as a writer with her 1926 story 'Covenant with a Child'. which caused a scandal because of its unsentimental depiction of childbirth and motherhood. A Stranger, widely considered her masterpiece, was first published in 1936. She left Poland after the outbreak of the Second World War, living in France and then England before settling in the United States, where Kuncewiczowa lectured on Polish literature at the University of Chicago. In the 1960s she returned to Kazimierz Dolny, Poland, where she lived until the end of her life.



Incredibly fine-wrought... like a musical fugue