ANNA AND THE SWALLOW MAN

Kraków, 1939. A million marching soldiers and a thousand barking dogs. This is no place to grow up. Anna ?ania is just seven years old when the Germans take her father, a linguistics professor, during their purge of intellectual Poland. She’s alone. And then she meets The Swallow Man.

He is a mystery, strange and tall, a skilled deceiver with more than a little magic up his sleeve, and when the soldiers in the streets look at him, they see what he wants them to see. The Swallow Man is not Anna’s father— she knows that very well— but she also knows that, like her father, he’s in danger of being taken, and like her father, he has a gift for languages: Polish, Russian, German, Yiddish— even Bird. When he calls a bright, beautiful swallow down to his hand to stop her from crying, Anna is entranced. She follows him into the wilderness. Over the course of their travels together, Anna and the Swallow Man will dodge bombs, tame soldiers and even, despite their better judgment, make a friend. But things quickly grow complicated. Anna falls for the beautiful carelessness of a Jewish musician; the Germans are advancing, teeth bared, toward the Soviet border, boxing them all in; and everything in this upside-down world-at-war can prove dangerous. Even the Swallow Man. ANNA AND THE SWALLOW MAN is a 51,800 word novel at the intersection of magic realism and fairytale that adult readers of Yann Martel and Neil Gaiman will steal from their children’s bedsides. It’s a story about growing up— all the way up— that lives somewhere in the borderlands between “Young” and “Adult.”