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About the Book

For nearly half a century, Albania was held captive by one man. A cruel dictator with a deep paranoid streak, Enver Hoxha sealed the country’s borders, severed alliances, and enacted a totalitarian regime of gulags and purges. Many thousands suffered and died in silence, a silence that lingers today: decades after Hoxha’s death, his 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 Hoxha’s 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.

Praise for Mud Sweeter than Honey

Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2021

2021 Foreword INDIES Finalist – History

Winner of the Polityka Passport Award

Winner of the Kościelski Award

Shortlisted for the Nike Prize

“Like Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, whose oral histories have documented political oppression, Rejmer allows the voices of everyday Albanians—writers and artists, teachers and farm workers, educated or barely schooled—to reveal the privations and fear under which they lived…. A gripping book of starkly revealing testimony.” 

—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review, Best Nonfiction of 2021

“[An] incredibly moving collection of oral histories…. Important enough to be added to the history curriculum.”

—Tim Stanley, The Telegraph, five-star review

“It is a pioneering, necessary book of such uncompromising clarity that even readers familiar with the broad outlines of Albania’s recent past are likely to find its contents shocking. Statistics can give a glimpse of the story … but Rejmer’s first-person accounts add degrees of searing detail that such figures cannot convey….. Perhaps Rejmer’s most original contribution is her assessment of the psychological impact of Albanian communism.... Margo Rejmer’s successful marshalling of multiple voices in Mud Sweeter Than Honey demonstrates one method of digging more deeply.”

—Roderick Bailey, Literary Review

“Margo Rejmer [has earned] widespread praise for both her meticulous reportage and her discerningly detailed narratives…. The worlds depicted are all at once worn with secrecy, curious with hope, and bold with the human instinct for survival…. [Rejmer] lets the lived experience of Albanians speak for themselves, until the whole spectrum comes into view; from victims to survivors, heroes to collaborators, Rejmer puts to the page their pain and doubts, their own attempts at dealing with the different roles reality forced them into, their bitterness at the lack of justice in today’s Albania…. Indeed, the voices, rendered in English by a seamless translation, stay with the reader long after the book’s final pages.” 

—Filip Noubel, Asymptote

“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 Alexievich’s 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

“Mud Sweeter Than Honey transports the reader to a very specific place and time: Albania in the second half of the 20th century. Margo Rejmer’s book – translated by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and Antonia Lloyd-Jones — chronicles life in Albania under the decades-long rule of Enver Hoxha. It’s a striking dispatch of one nation’s lived experiences.”

—Tobias Carroll, InsideHook, “The 10 Books You Should Be Reading This November”

“Mud Sweeter Than Honey is a moving evocation of the 'everyday terror' systematically perpetrated over 41 years of Albanian communism. The author, a Polish journalist and writer, brings together survivors' accounts of life under Albania's ruthless dictator, Enver Hoxha. Despite the inevitable bleakness, the author's skillful interviewing allows those recounting their experiences to engage us in their absorbing narratives. An illuminating if harrowing insight into life in a totalitarian state.” 

—Clarissa de Waal, author of Albania: Portrait of a Country in Transition

“Rejmer’s is a fine collection and one that ... picks up on a theme of disappointment in the wake of communism’s collapse.”  

—Tim Judah, Financial Times

“One finds a jaw dropping world within…. An unforgettable account of life in a prison state.” 

—Strong Words Magazine, Best Books of 2021

“Mud Sweeter than Honey serves as an essential reminder that to move on from a painful national past should never mean to forget it or brush it aside…. The powerful, often chilling stories in Mud Sweeter than Honey attest to the truth that even a regime as atrocious as Hoxha’s cannot triumph in the long run over the irrepressible human yearning for freedom and dignity.”  

—From the Introduction by Tony Barber

About the Author

About the Translators

Zosia Krasodomska-Jones is a literary translator working from Polish. Since being selected for the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorship in 2018 with Antonia Lloyd-Jones, she has translated several books and collaborates regularly with online journals. Mud Sweeter than Honey is her first nonfiction translation. She holds dual British-Polish citizenship and lives in Brussels, Belgium.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry, and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.

About the Introducer

Tony Barber is European Affairs Columnist of the Financial Times. He is a former foreign correspondent in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, the former Soviet Union, the US, and the former Yugoslavia.

Book Details

Hardcover ISBN: 9781632062833 • $28
Publication date: Nov 16, 2021
6" x 9" • 304 pages
Nonfiction—Reportage / Polish / Albania / Dictatorship / Communism
Rights: North America, Audio
eBook ISBN: 9781632062840

Books by Margo Rejmer