This very good but slightly harrowing book will make you grateful for your comfortable bed and fridge full of food. During World War Two, Silvania and her infant son, Aurek, flee Warsaw. After a series of horrors she ends up in the forest with a toddler, barely surviving through freezing winters and burning summers, so disconnected from humanity they have no way of knowing when the war is over. As a refugee she is eventually moved to England to live with Janusz, the husband she and her son haven’t seen for six years. She and Janusz are like both have dark secrets from the war years and their failure to share them means they can never fully reconnect with one another, despite their desire to do so. Aurek arguably has the hardest time, learning to share his mother and adjust to a world which he makes little sense to him, while all the while longing to be back in the forest.
The ending is a little predictable, but the path to get there is believable and absorbing.
