The Snow Hare
A Novel
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4.1 • 11 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this "riveting, heartfelt" novel of love and consequences (Heather Morris, New York Times bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz), a woman dreams of becoming a doctor until World War II leads her instead into an astonishing love—and a fateful choice.
Is it possible to fall in love at the edge of life?
Lena has lived a long, quiet life on her farm in Wales, alongside her husband and child. But as her end approaches, buried memories begin to return. Of her childhood in Poland, and her passion for science. Of the early days of her marriage, reluctant wife to an army officer. Of the birth of her daughter, whose arrival changed everything.
Memories less welcome return, too. Her Polish village, transformed overnight by the Soviets, and the war that doomed her entire family to the frigid work camps of the Siberian tundra. And buried in that blinding snow, amongst the darkness of survival, the most haunting memory of all: that of an extraordinary new love.
Exploring motherhood, marriage, consequences, and our incredible human capacity for hope, The Snow Hare is the story of a woman who dares to love and to dream in the face of impossible odds, and of the peace we each must make with our choices, even long after the years have gone by.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lichtarowicz (Creative Truths in Provincial Policing) delivers a dramatic story of a Polish woman's coming-of-age during WWII. Lena, drifting in and out of consciousness on her deathbed in present day England, reflects on her youth in southern Poland in the 1930s, when she aspired to be a medical student. After she's badly injured by a streetcar, a soldier named Anton who was courting her devotedly sits by her bedside, and her parents, with Austen-esque machinations, consent for Anton to marry her. They have a daughter after she unsuccessfully tries to run away, and soon he's imprisoned as a traitor by the new Soviet-controlled government. Lena and her family, meanwhile, are sent to a labor camp in Siberia, where she finds a lifeline in Grigori, a Russian guard who at one point takes Lena by sleigh to the tundra, where he shoots an elk and trades its meat for a dairy goat whose milk helps keep Lena, her daughter, and her infant nephew alive. When her time is up at the camp, she's confronted with the complex reality of her prospects with Grigori and Anton. The gripping narrative of Lena's wartime experiences contrasts bleak deprivation and suffering with sumptuous scenes of familial affection and the ache of true love. This will transport readers.
