Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveller. His journeys - by car, train, bus, ferry - take him from his native Poland to small towns and villages with unfamiliar yet evocative names in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine. Here is an unfamiliar Europe, grappling with the remnants of the Communist era and the arrival of capitalism and globalisation.

'Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin,' he wonders, as he is being driven at breakneck speed in a hundred-year-old Audi - loose wires hanging from the dashboard - by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. And so his journey continues all the way to Babadag, near the shore of the Black Sea, where he sees his first minaret.

Born in Warsaw in 1960, Andrzej Stasiukhas risen to become one of the most important and interesting writers at work in Eastern Europe today. Author of over a dozen books and winner of many prizes, he came to writing in an unusual way: in the early 1980s, he deserted the army and spent a year and a half in prison for it. Afterwards he wrote a collection of short stories,The Walls of Hebron, about his experience, which became a huge success. He and his wife, Monika Sznajderman, run a small publishing house in Czarne.

A brilliant and ground-breaking collection of travel narratives from Central and Eastern Europe.>