Mud Sweeter Than Honey: Voices of Communist Albania

A revelatory oral history of everyday life under one of the twentieth century's most isolated and Kafkaesque regimes, from an award-winning Polish writer of reportage.

For nearly half a century Albania was held captive by one man. A brutal dictator with a deep paranoid streak, Enver Hoxha sealed the country's borders, severed one alliance after another, and enacted a Stalinist regime of gulags and purges that persisted long after the death of Stalin himself. Many thousands suffered and died in silence, a silence that lingers today: no truth and reconciliation commission has ever fully reckoned with what happened to the people of Albania.

In Mud Sweeter than Honey, Albanians break the silence themselves. Malgorzata Rejmer spent years in Albania gathering interviews that span the four decades of Hoxha's rule and virtually every walk of life: teachers and children, writers in prison and in exile, 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 the most vivid, intimate portrait available in English to date of this little-understood corner of Europe.