Chopin’s travels

Nowaczyk was concerned above all to reconstruct with the greatest possible accuracy the day-today realities of the composer’s life and times, and in the process to bring what I called ‘a real sense of historical immediacy’ to a story whose outline is already well known, but which is held by most of us at a certain distance. Nowaczyk’s findings are evidence-based throughout, but at the same time they are informed by an historical imagination that brings the events to colourful, compellingly vivid, life. He was not of course writing fiction, anything but. He was determined to get the facts right, as far as this was possible. But in the course of his investigations, he often entered a world not unlike that of the historical novelist, finding evidence where he could – sometimes in the unlikeliest of places – in order to create a living biography rather than a mere chronicle. […] Nowaczyk’s characteristic method was to shine a light into what we might normally consider marginalia, and then to allow that light to be refracted back to the centre.
Jim Samson, excerpts from the Introduction