Spring Will Be Ours

by Sue Gee

Fascinating glimpse in to the relatively recent history of Poland; WW2 up to the declaration of Martial Law in 1981, and then goes on to show the effects on the Polish diaspora in London. It follows one family mainly but brings others as well for the later story.

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Sue Gee was born in India, where her father was an Army officer. She had a her elder brother, Robert, now a retired radiographer living in Spain. She grew up on a Devon farm, and in a village in Leicestershire, before instaled in Surrey in 1960. She lived in north London for 27 years with the journalist Marek Mayer, they had a son, Jamie. She married Mayer in November 2003, less of two years before his death on 23th July 2005. Now, she lived in the town of Hay-on-Wye in the Welsh borders.

Published since 1980, her novel Letters From Prague, was serialised on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour and Her play, Ancient and Modern, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2004, with Juliet Stevenson in the lead role. Her novel The Hours of the Night which received wide critical acclaim and was the controversial winner of the 1997 Romantic Novel of the Year Award, an award she won again in 2004 by her novel Thin Air.

She was Programme Leader for the MA Writing programme at Middlesex University from 2000 to 2008. She is currently reading for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has been awarded a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship.

Reviews

[Judith Paterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating glimpse in to the relatively recent history of Poland; WW2 up to the declaration of Martial Law in 1981, and then goes on to show the effects on the Polish diaspora in London.
It follows one family mainly but brings others as well for the later story.
Sue Gee's partner was of polish decent and I assume it is pretty accurate.

[Pam Milburn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting on the history of Poland. Got a bit draggy towards an unsatisfactory ending, sort of fizzled out.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have Polish friends whose parents share a story similar to the family in this novel and I learned a great deal about not only life as a post war Pole in Britain, but also about the sufferings and repeated disappointments of the Polish people during the second world war. It's only with this knowledge that I begun to gain a deeper understanding of Polish culture, and of the difficulties in integrating into an alien society. It gets quite heavy in detail in the sections about the war, but it's definitely worth hanging in there to appreciate just what an effect this time had on a family generations later.

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had this massive tome on my shelf for a long while, and the sheer size and weight of it kept putting me off, this is not a book to be read in bed, especially in hardback version. Then just before we went on holiday my dear other half bought me a kindle and the kindle store offered this qite cheaply, so I downloaded it, and read it in fairly short order.
Fabulous. I loved it.