She fled Poland as a child. She thought Anglesey would keep her safe. She was wrong.
When Lauren Bucievski and her father take flight from Poland during the 1905 revolution, the ten-year-old girl has little understanding of who her father's enemies are. All she knows is that they must run and keep running. Seven years later, Lauren is living quietly in Church Bay on the remote west coast of Anglesey isolated, watchful, and still carrying the weight of a past she doesn't understand.
Then in her cautious lonely world new tensions surface.
There arrives from Poland, the charismatic and possibly dangerous Stefan. Also into her life comes Jimmy Jilkes - likeable, warm, and full of easy laughter, a travelling salesman who begins to fall for her.
But when 1914 sets the world on fire, even carefree Jimmy finds himself swallowed by the horror of the trenches. Across a bleeding Europe, a young Polish soldier claws his way through captivity, forced labour, and the unrelenting chaos of the Western Front. He has survived things that should have broken him. But survival and living are not the same thing.
Two worlds. One war. And lives that will collide in ways neither could have survived alone.
The Exile's Daughter is historical fiction that gets under your skin sweeping in scope, intimate in detail, moving between the windswept solitude of rural Wales and the chaos of a war that swallowed a generation
Fans of Birdsong, The Alice Network, and Suite Française won't want to miss this.
