Mapped
The Issa Valley
Czesław Miłosz
Miłosz's lyrical novel of boyhood follows Thomas, growing up on his grandparents' manor in the Issa valley of Lithuania in the years after the First World War, a world of forests, folk belief, hunting and the tangled loyalties of Poles, Lithuanians and Jews. He drew the valley from his own childhood at Szetejnie on the Nevėžis: the manor and its estate, the slow river and its meadows, the deep forests full of the old pagan spirits, and the village church.
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Vilnius Poker
Ričardas Gavelis
The Soviet-era Vilnius of a paranoid mind: the capital of occupied Lithuania in the 1970s, its baroque Old Town, its library and its river all watched and warped by an unseen 'Them'. The map holds to the historic centre, from the university library and Cathedral Square up the castle hill to Gediminas Avenue, then renamed for Lenin, and the bend of the Neris.
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