I’ve reviewed several of Amanda’s books here including the multi-award winning Within These Walls of Sorrow, and The White Rose Resists. I know what to expect from her books by now. Stories that shatter your soul. Her wonderful writing expertly evokes wartime Europe. She handles the depravity of wartime so carefully that her descriptions are deep but never gratuitous. Her books are ultimately uplifting. Except in order to experience that ultimate hope, a reader has to visit some very dark places.
At the end of a wearying year, with the uneasy feeling that populism is on the ascendancy in world politics, I found it hard to want to read about WWII Poland. I delayed picking up this book despite having the honour of an advanced copy as part of her launch team. I should have known better. This story continues her pattern of impeccable historical research and deep insight into “the courage of the commonplace” (her words, note mine).
Read Amanda’s peek behind the pages of The Warsaw Sisters.
We meet twin sisters Helena and Antonina in 1939, as Warsaw teeters on the cusp of war, and fall headlong with them into the barbarism wrought on their city. Estranged from each other through misunderstanding, the sisters pursue resistance in their own ways––one is a people smuggler and one is a soldier––and through them we witness some of the most brutal parts of the German occupation. Sieges. Bombings. Doomed uprisings. Mass slaughters.
Amanda’s skill is taking devastating details from historical accounts, and reweaving them into her narrative so that it feels like a first hand account. (Amanda’s historical notes at the end of the book highlight where and how she has done this.) As time marches steadily away from these events and the eyewitnesses to this history pass away, the importance of a novelist’s skill to recreate them with unflinching detail grows.
This is not a light story (even the ending is tainted by the knowledge that Poland ultimately swapped a Nazi occupation for a Soviet one) but it pays great honour to the people of Poland. You will be thinking about it long after you have put it down.
Buy from Amazon US, Amazon Australia or find other links at Amanda’s website (where you can also read an excerpt).