The drawing-room was entirely English. The Office of Works had provided deep armchairs, a sofa you could have slept on, though of course nobody had ever done so, and a low glass-topped table.

A young English woman arrives in the Polish People's Republic to visit her older sister, who married a Polish soldier after the war, disappearing into a life behind the Iron Curtain. This award-winning novel of the harsh cruelties and deprivations of life in Communist Poland is told with truth, wit and understanding.