Author:Matthew Kelly
Following the partitioning of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, Matthew Kelly's great grandmother and her two daughters were deported to the East. Thus began an extraordinary ordeal that took them, and many thousands like them, on a journey stretching from Siberia to Pakistan, and beyond. Their male relatives endured a parallel journey; arrested, exiled, and held as prisoners of war. Countless numbers were summarily executed by the Red Army. They saw the steppe, they were put to work in labour camps, they built sections of the trans-Siberian railway, they cleared forests, they toiled on collective farms. They knew hunger, exhaustion, disease and death.
Persecuted by the Soviet Union, Poland was to become its unexpected ally following the German invasion in 1941. A new Polish army, 'The Anders Army' was assembled in Palestine. For a brief moment, in Kazakhstan, families were reunited, before being evacuated; to India, to Britain, to Mexico and East Africa; and from there, across the world. The experiences of these Poles had consequences far reaching and enduring, both to Poland, to Polish identity, and to the families that survived; reverberating through generations.
These incredible stories remain largely untold. In Finding Poland Matthew Kelly embarks on a journey through his ancestor's footsteps, travelling through places they lived, and landscapes they survived, to provide an account of these extraordinary people and their unique history. Part memoir, history and travel book, it is also a profound meditation on the experience of displacement and exile, of the impact of such seismic disruption, and the deep legacies such trauma bequeaths.
Both as a work of history and as an upmarket version of Who Do You Think You Are? this book is a great success
—— Dominic Sandbrook , The Sunday TimesA fascinating blend of biography and history, which poignantly evokes the pain and loss attendant on exile, in both wartime and peace.
—— Ian Thomson , Daily TelegraphIn Finding Poland, about his grandmother's deportation from Poland, he has a cracking story which he tells with compassion, verve, and the professional historian's restraint and accuracy
—— Bridget Hourican , Irish TimesMoving book...Scholarly without being oppressive, Kelly's book reminds us how millions of people in the last century were uprooted by war and ideology, their expectations blown to the winds, their horizons utterly altered.
—— Dominic Sandbrook , Sunday TimesIt is mesmerising to read about a world careering to hell
—— IndependentOne of the best and most moving memoirs I have ever read.
—— Ruth Rendell , Sunday TimesEdith's Story, the memoir of an Anne Frank who lived, reminds us of the old horror all the more effectively bu not being a horror story. Evil and grief, without being scanted, are outshone by sweetness, freshness, and pluck.
—— Roy Blount Jr.A significant Holocaust memoir... A valuable opportunity to see the situation just outside Anne's attic.
—— Kirkus ReviewsA totally original comedy writer
—— Michael PalinA compelling account of the bloody and deluded last days of the Third Reich ... this is far from being of mere academic interest ... The greatest strength of Kershaw's narrative is that he gives us much more than the view from the top ... Interwoven are insights into German life and death at all levels of society
—— The Times[Kershaw] understands as well as any man alive the complex power structure that existed in Nazi Germany ... Gripping ... arguably the most convincing portrait of Germany's Götterdämmerung we have seen so far
—— Wall Street JournalBritain's most feted and prolific historian of the Third Reich
—— Sunday Times[Kershaw] is among the foremost western scholars of Nazi Germany. Although this book pursues a narrative of events between June 1944 and May 1945, its real business is to explore the psychology of the German people
—— Max Hastings , Sunday TimesAn insightful study of how the Führer held his grip over the German people for so long
—— TelegraphComprehensive ... it generates real power
—— ObserverPulsing with imaginative energy, it displays Morrison’s veteran ability to combine physical and social immediacy with psychological and emotional subtlety. A fine addition to Morrison’s expansive chronicling of black American history, Home is a compact triumph.
—— Sunday TimesA highly fractured tale intended to resemble the crumbling nature of Money’s existence post war. Nothing is over-laboured. Each word resounds with sultry, heat-oppressive Georgia.
—— SpectatorMorrison's writing is so deft that even barely sketched characters leap off the page
—— Sunday TelegraphHome is a powerful reminder of the impact the past plays on the present
—— The TimesMorrison can say more in one word than most novelists manage in an entire book. Superb
—— Glasgow Sunday HeraldBursting with poetic language and horrific events this is a penetrating insight to the African-American experience
—— The LadyIt is a powerful set-up, building suspense and a mounting sense of anxiety
—— GuardianToni Morrison’s mesmerising prose manages to be both elegiac and visceral at the same time
—— Mail on Sunday
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