First published 2019
In the village of Primeval, four archangels stand watch over a community caught between ancient rhythms and modern violence. Misia tends her kitchen while wars rage beyond the village borders. Her husband Michal works the land as political upheavals reshape Poland around them. Their neighbors include a miller who grinds grain and gossip, a gamekeeper who knows the forest's secrets, and children who grow up as decades collapse into each other. The village endures invasion, occupation, and liberation while its people love, suffer, and die according to patterns older than history. Time moves in strange currents here, where dreams bleed into waking life and the boundary between myth and reality dissolves. As the 20th century grinds forward, Primeval becomes a stage where the eternal struggle between nature's feminine wisdom and modernity's masculine force plays out in the lives of ordinary people. Each villager carries their own relationship with time, memory, and forgetting. The archangels watch it all unfold, guardians of a world that must be born, grow, and eventually pass away like everything that lives.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: magical-realism, mythology, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Primeval, Poland
Period: 20th-Century, 21st-Century
256 pages · Paperback · Independently published