Set against a backdrop of the current political and cultural upheaval in
the US and Eastern Europe, The Unmade World is a thoughtful, scope-y
literary novel with a dose of suspense that moves from Poland to
California to the Hudson Valley and back to Poland. It covers a decade
in the lives of an American journalist and a Polish small businessman
turned petty criminal and the wrenching aftermath of an accidental,
tragic encounter between these two on a snowy night in 2006 on the
outskirts of Krakow. The accident costs the lives of the American
journalist Richard Brennan's wife and daughter, an event that colors the
rest of his life. It also leads to a downward spiral for Bogdan
Baranowsk, leaving emotional scars as he suffers the seemingly
inevitable loss of his business, his home, and his wife. The Unmade
World is a story of ordinary, otherwise decent people from various
backgrounds and circumstances who must learn how to live with the
personal grief, sense of guilt, and the emotional consequences of
violence. Along the way, the novel grapples with a spectrum of cultural
and political issues. It includes a murder mystery wrapped around the
corruption of major college sports, the pressures on immigrants and
refugees in both the US and Poland, the fallout of political change,
economic upheavals and armed conflicts--including the horrific
destruction of Luhansk, Ukraine in 2014. It also references the 2016
presidential campaign, cultural politics in the American university, and
the demise of print journalism, etc., though never in a dogmatic or
overtly partisan way.
