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.

Kasia Jaronczyk is a cell biologist by training. She has published poems and short stories in Carousel, Room, The Prairie Journal, Carousel, Nashwaak Review, and in Postscripts to Darkness (an anthology of dark & horror fiction). Her stories have won first place at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival Fiction Contest in 2010 and second place in the GritLit festival in 2014. Her work was longlisted for the CBC Radio Literary Award 2010 and shortlisted for the Bristol Prize 2016. She is the co-editor of an anthology of Polish-Canadian short stories that will be published in 2017 by Guernica Editions.

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