A Dancing Masquerade

As Vee Wildgoose's hundredth birthday beckons, she is increasingly preoccupied by her neglect of her mother's half of the family. Disturbingly, she can't account for the war-time fate of many of those Polish relatives. And yet how intimately she knew them all back then in the thirties. Somewhere in contemporary Poland she'll find the answers she seeks. But exhuming the past risks resurrecting unresolved relationships as well as uncovering a war-torn landscape of untold suffering and devastation. Given a choice, she'd much rather leave the harrowing past undisturbed, buried beneath the Polish soil. But now, she no longer has the luxury of time on her side. Whatever the challenges, Vee must finally face up to the past, no matter how thick and fast the revelations come, and no matter how devastating the emotional consequences prove.This panoramic, century-spanning journey of discovery, ranging across Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, is part multi-generational family drama, part epistolary novel and part picaresque travelogue. Its recurring themes of open borders, freedom of movement and forced migration are both timely and timeless.