A richly evocative and moving portrait of an ordinary Polish Jewish family in the years preceding the Second World War

Though he returned from America penniless, Nathan Stramer still daydreams of a better life. Raising six children with his wife Rywka in a poor area of Tarnów, he chases hare-brained schemes to make money while she fantasises about a trip to the seaside.

Meanwhile, their children are taking steps out into a changing world. Rudek, the eldest, sets his passions aside for a practical job; Rena falls in love with a married man, and Hesio and Salek get ever more involved with Communism.

While Nathan and Rywka try to hold the centre of their raucous family life, national conflicts begin to escalate, and something sinister creeps into the Stramers' world that they don't yet understand.

"A masterpiece of foreshadowing... The last hundred pages are unbearably moving. The writing gets better and better, as you turn the pages faster and faster to find out what becomes of them. This is one of the great east European novels of our time" - Jewish Chronicle

"Lozinski has managed to write a novel we don't want to finish, we want to keep living in the Stramers' world. The protagonists' fates lead on, into a different Poland... Marvellous" - Polityka

"With freshness and lively humour... Lozinski crafts an epic that is as gripping as it is endearing" - Le Monde

"A great, compelling, and beautiful tale of a family, of the bonds that tie brothers and sisters, of support in every circumstance, no matter how complex... The Stramer family and their town of Tarnów are painted so vividly that it seems Mikolaj Lozinski has been given the divine talent of time travel" - Vogue

"Outstanding... This is the kind of book people wait to find: wise and brilliantly written... Lozinski has not written a novel about the Holocaust, but about the life that came before it" - Newsweek

"The reader is captivated from the novel's opening sentences and feels they are right in the middle of the Stramers' small apartment, sharing their longings, joys and fears" - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"The author succeeds in lending even the tragic a light, sometimes humorous touch... An event" - Neue Zürcher Zeitung