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, & 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 & deprivations of life in Communist Poland is told with truth, wit & understanding.