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 names in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine.

'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.

Here is an unfamiliar Europe, grappling with the remnants of the Communist era and the arrival of capitalism and globalisation.

'An eulogy for the old Europe, the Europe both in and out of time, the Europe now lost in the folds of the map' Guardian

'This book has a peculiar charm and power' Literary Review

'Stasiuk's journeys are vivid poetry? What formally also underpins Stasiuk's travels, and rather beautifully embodies his resistance to the future, is how his prose communicates the working of memory, mirroring its inconsequentiality' Prospect