The stories in Purity take the reader through cities and suburbs, apartments and streets, to find characters struggling to survive in modern society: a man has an outburst on a bus; a fugitive finds insight in a colour wheel; a social realist kills his friend with a hammer; a thief finds himself in books. And cleaners reluctantly go on cleaning. With gravity and humour, against the backdrop of a violent civilization, people are depicted as fallen, or waiting to fall, rendered by Tichy with the fury, compassion and emotional complexity of Kendrick Lamar.

Stylish and gritty, stories of class mobility and clash, from the author of International Booker finalist Wretchedness

About the Author
Andrzej Tichy was born in Prague to a Polish mother and a Czech father and has lived in Sweden since 1981. In Sweden, Wretchedness was a finalist for the August Prize and won the Eyvind Johnson Prize, while Purity was a finalist for the 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize. A translator Swedish and Norwegian literature, Nichola Smalley is also publicist at And Other Stories. In 2015 she finished a PhD exploring the use of contemporary urban vernaculars in Swedish and UK rap and literature at UCL. Her translations range from a Swedish book about Brazilian football (Jogo Bonito by Henrik Brandao Joensson (Yellow Jersey Press)), to the latest novel by Norwegian superstar Jostein Gaarder, An Unreliable Man (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

Reviews

'Purity is a strong, challenging book, emotionally charged, intricate and ceaselessly fascinating, poetic and tender, even humorous in its dark way, through all its roughness, deep grief, blood and grime.' Aftonbladet

'When Tichy combines his concrete social realism with a slip into hypnotic stream of consciousness, it become completely brilliant. Tichy writes interpersonal tenderness and love just as sharply as he depicts pain, and powerful resistance.' Goeteborgs-Posten

'A feverish kind of despair about the eternal machine that is the abuse of power thrusts Tichy's disparate voices into an affecting whole.' Svenska Dagbladet

'As in all his best books, Tichy is an entertainer. Funny and drastic, smart and tough, without ever letting the tragedy become comedy. It is the style, between elegant novelistic prose and the colloquial, that lends these fragmentary stories a glint of something almost cheerful; the laughter when, staring into the abyss, you realise it is staring right back at you.' Expressen

'How something can be simultaneously so powerful and so precise is hard to comprehend. But as a depiction of human existence in today's evermore precarious labour market, it is brilliant. The truth is that it's rare to find literary prose, or for that matter political criticism, as refined as this.' Dagens Nyheter

'Tichy describes disturbing incidents with bracing candour. Taken together, these stories form an unforgettable tableau of life on the edge.' Publishers Weekly

'A dizzying look inside the heads of people at the margins.' Kirkus Reviews

'These are nimble stories, nauseating and discordant, that shuffle your feelings and loyalties as you read them.' Sarah Gale, Literary Review

Book Information
ISBN 9781913505981
Author Andrzej Tich
Format Paperback
Page Count 124
Imprint And Other Stories
Publisher And Other Stories