"’You can’t go home again,’ is the refrain in the two essays in Within, Without: On Two Cities (Seagull Books, £13.99; Tablet price £12.59). In ’There, There’, Piotr Florczyk’s Kraków is not the Unesco World Heritage city of tourists eyeing up Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine, but the adjacent workers’ district Nowa Huta, now teeming with young families and trendy creatives, a development viewed with mixed feelings. In ’Silent City’, Ilya Kaminsky’s Odesa is a precarious affair, his foundling father, a wartime survivor, passing his savvy on to his deaf son, his formidable mother fiercely shielding him from everyday cruelty and stupidity: ’Deafness is a theatre. Here the deaf person is the audience. Everyone else is an actor.’ Talent thinks, genius sees."

The Tablet