Fitzcarraldo Editions, the London publisher known for the blue-spined fiction list run by Jacques Testard, brought out Kazimierz Linde's The Long Strand on 2026-05-21 in an edition of 4,000 copies. The book is 312 pages, set on a 14-kilometre stretch of the Polish Baltic coast between the villages of Mrzeżyno and Niechorze, between the years 1933 and 2023.
Linde is seventy-three. He has published nine novels in Polish since 1981, of which two have previously appeared in English. The Stations, translated by Bill Johnston for Archipelago Books in 2009, and The Boatyard, translated by Anna Zaranko for Twisted Spoon Press in 2017. The new book is his third in English and his most ambitious.
The structure is straightforward and difficult. Each chapter is dated to a single day on the beach. The first chapter is dated 14 July 1933. The last is dated 8 September 2023. There are forty-one chapters, none more than ten pages.
The same beach appears in every chapter. The reader gradually learns the geography: the long sandbar that emerges at low tide, the wreck of a Kriegsmarine S-boat in the shallows, the wooden boardwalk built in 1962 that was washed away in the 1986 storms, the new concrete groynes installed in 2004.
Linde does not give the reader a map. The geography is reconstructed slowly, through repetition. By the third chapter, the reader knows that the wreck lies forty metres offshore in roughly a metre and a half of water at high tide. By the tenth, the reader knows what kinds of seaweed wash up after a southwesterly.
The characters are not, for the most part, continuous between chapters. Each day on the beach brings a different person. Some recur — a fisherman from Mrzeżyno named Janusz Galon appears in eight chapters across forty years — but most appear once.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who is among the senior translators from Polish into English, has done careful work. Her sentences are short. Her vocabulary is plain. She has kept the Polish names of the seaweeds and the boats untranslated, with a four-page glossary at the back.
The book's first hundred pages are extraordinary. The early chapters, set in the 1930s, render a Pomeranian coast that no longer exists. Linde has clearly read deeply in the local archives at Szczecin, and the small details — the price of a fishing licence in 1934, the brand of cigarette a German tourist smoked in 1937, the kind of bread a baker's wife sold at a beach stall in 1939 — accumulate without ever feeling researched.
The Second World War occupies six chapters, dated August 1940, June 1942, November 1943, March 1944, May 1945, and September 1945. They are the book's most disciplined chapters. Linde does not dramatize. The Soviet advance arrives, in the May 1945 chapter, as a single woman walking east along the beach with a child on her back.
The post-war chapters are uneven. Linde is on harder ground writing about the People's Republic period than he is writing about the Germans, and the chapters set between 1946 and 1989 sometimes feel as if they are completing a duty rather than telling a story.
The 1976 chapter, in particular, in which a low-level Party official walks the beach in November with a bottle of cherry vodka, is the kind of set piece that Polish fiction has done many times. Linde does it well, but the reader has been here before.
The book recovers in its 1990s chapters. The 1991 chapter, set in the first summer after the end of Communist rule, in which three Berlin tourists arrive on the beach with a 1986 West German guidebook, is one of the funniest in the book. Linde has a dry humour that Lloyd-Jones renders without overplaying.
The contemporary chapters, set between 2015 and 2023, are the most challenging. Linde is writing about the present, and the present is hardest. The 2019 chapter, in which a Warsaw lawyer's family arrives at a new luxury resort built on the dunes, is too on the nose. The 2022 chapter, in which a Ukrainian refugee family walks the beach in March, is better but still uneasy.
The final chapter, dated 8 September 2023, is the book's quietest. It returns to Janusz Galon, the fisherman, now eighty-one and not fishing anymore. He sits on the boardwalk for an afternoon and watches the wreck of the S-boat at low tide. The chapter is five pages. It does not summarize the book. It does not need to.
Fitzcarraldo has produced the book in its standard format: the deep-blue paper cover, French flaps, sewn binding, the type set in the imprint's familiar serif. It is 14.99 pounds for the paperback. There is no hardback edition planned.
The cover carries no image, only the title and the author's name in white. This is house style at Fitzcarraldo, and it has the effect, with a book like this one, of throwing all the work onto the prose.
The translator's note, by Lloyd-Jones, is two pages and is mostly about her decision to keep the Polish months of the year (lipiec for July, sierpień for August) in the first three chapters and then switch to English. The choice is defensible. It signals the German-Polish handover on the coast in 1945. A reader who notices the change will appreciate it. A reader who does not will not be confused.
There are flaws in the book that are not in the translation. The 1958 chapter is the worst. Linde indulges in a long passage about a child finding a Wehrmacht helmet in the sand, and the passage is the kind of cliched lyricism that the rest of the book avoids. It should have been cut.
The 2007 chapter, in which a German tourist returns to look for the house his grandfather lived in before 1945, is also weak. Linde handles the encounter with restraint, but the reader has seen this scene in too many other Polish novels. It does not need to be in this one.
These are small complaints about a substantial book. The Long Strand is the kind of novel that small presses exist to publish: a 312-page literary fiction by an older writer in a smaller language, translated by a senior translator, marketed quietly to readers who already trust the imprint.
Fitzcarraldo has been doing this for a decade and has built an audience for it. Linde will not be a household name in English even after this book. He will be a name that careful readers know, and that a small number of younger novelists will read closely.
The Long Strand is not the place to start with Linde. New readers should begin with The Stations, which is shorter and warmer. They should come to The Long Strand second, when they are prepared to give it the time it asks for.
It is not a book to be hurried through. It is not a book to be read on a train. It is a book to be read on a quiet weekend, two or three chapters at a sitting, with the world outside doing whatever it does.