The Exile`s Daughter

By John Wheatley

From the windswept coast of Wales to the trenches of Europe, no one escapes the tides of history.

The Exile's Daughter is a sweeping historical novel interweaving the fates of displaced Poles, rural Welsh villagers, and the shifting fronts of the First World War.

The story opens with a flash-forward to 1914, Olsztyn, Poland, with a deadly explosion that sweeps up a young Polish soldier into German captivity. Wounded and shuffled between work camps, he witnesses the grim realities of forced labour and the shifting fortunes of war, from Tannenberg to the Western Front.

His story is interspersed with that of Lauren Bucievski. In 1905, when Lauren 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. Seven years later - now living in Church Bay on the remote west coast of Anglesey - she befriends the happy-go-lucky Jimmy Jilkes. When the charismatic Stefan turns up from Poland, her life is thrown into conflict, vulnerable as she is, in her isolation, to her own dawning sexuality.

he outbreak of war in 1914 becomes the defining factor in how each of their destinies will turn out.

Through richly drawn vignettes, the narrative moves between Lauren's quiet but watchful life in North Wales and the war engulfing Europe,

Told with vivid historical detail and intimate character work, Exile is a novel of survival, exile, and the thin lines between safety and danger, home and displacement. It captures the slow rhythms of rural life against the relentless churn of world events, exploring how ordinary moments-a glass of water, a smile, a walk to the bay-can echo across lives shaped by history's largest upheavals.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1480016349
• ISBN13: 9781480016347
• Release Date: November 2012
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"