Winner of the Polityka Passport Award
Winner of the Koscielski Award
A revelatory oral history of the people who suffered, rebelled, and survived under the secretive dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in Albania, one of the twentieth centurys most brutal and Kafkaesque regimes, from award-winning Polish journalist Margo Rejmer.
For nearly half a century Albania was held captive by one man. A cruel dictator with a deep paranoid streak, Enver Hoxha sealed the countrys borders, severed alliances, and enacted a totalitarian regime of gulags and purges. Many thousands suffered and died in silence, a silence that lingers today: thirty years after the end of Hoxhas regime, its victims are still waiting for justice.
In Mud Sweeter than Honey, Albanians break the silence. Margo Rejmer spent years in Albania gathering interviews that shed light on the four decades of Hoxhas rule and virtually every walk of life: teachers and children, imprisoned and exiled writers, nuns and factory workers. She arranges the voices of her interlocutors into a chorus that bears witness to how ordinary people lived and died. We are immersed in desperate border crossings, prison revolts, and everyday struggles to make a living. We meet a writer who finds secret freedom in a tiny village library of banned books, overlooked by censors. We meet a man who still only speaks in a whisper, afraid of being overheard.
While Albanians endured surveillance, imprisonment, and torture under Hoxha, they also read books and fell in love, raised families and found ways to survive. In the tradition of Svetlana Alexievich, Mud Sweeter than Honey is our most vivid, intimate portrait available in English of this little-understood corner of Europe.
Albania's experience under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha has received less attention than other repressive regimes. A new book provides a timely and truly chilling spotlight
. The statistics are shocking enough but, as ever, its the individual stories that get under your skin and Mud Sweeter Than Honey is packed with harrowing examples
. [ An] extraordinary, eye-opening book
. Albania, enigmatic, mysterious Albania, was always the untold story of the Cold War, the 1989 revolutions and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mud Sweeter Than Honey goes a very long way indeed towards putting that right.
Charlie Connelly, The New European
Margo Rejmer, the Polish writer who assembled this extraordinary book, offers a polyphonic account of the victims of Albanian communism in the style of Svetlana Alexievichs Chernobyl Prayer
. As the journalist Tony Barber notes in his introduction, it serves as an essential reminder of dark days in the Balkans.
Ian Thomson, The Spectator
