VOICES IN THE AIR, Kasia Jaronczyk

Fiction
ISBN-13: 978-1-990293-89-4
$22.95 CDN / $22.95 US | Trade Paperback
February 2025

What would drive women to risk the lives of their children and innocent people to leave their mother country forever?

On April 30, 1982, two women and their families hijack a Polish passenger plane flying from Breslau to Warsaw in a bold attempt to escape Martial Law in Communist Poland and find safety in West Berlin. Among the hijackers are a cotton spinner whose husband wants to avoid a long prison sentence, a schoolteacher with a sick daughter, a pregnant fourteen-year-old who has visions of the Virgin Mary, and an ambitious young filmmaker. Inspired by real events, Voices in the Air is told from the point of view of these four women and a stewardess in love with the married pilot.  Will they find happiness beyond the Iron Curtain or was the hijacking not worth the risk?

Told using traditional narrative and documentary film-style interviews, Voices in the Air follows the main characters’ lives before and after the hijacking, and through real-life events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fight for women’s rights in modern Poland, the Covid pandemic and the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarus border. A must-read novel exploring ambiguous moral choice, censorship, emigration, fate and regret.

Praise for Voices in the Air

Kasia Jaronczyk’s Voices in the Air is a remarkable achievement – the novel depicts multiple characters as if they lived on two flaps with a hinge between them – a before and an after – with a dramatic event in the middle that changes everything for them all. The depiction of Marshal Law Poland is gritty and compelling, and the variety of post-emigration stories is psychologically subtle and profound.—Antanas Sileika The Death of Tony