The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman
On sale
3rd August 2023
Price: £9.99
‘Magnificent. Complex, wise, unsentimental and very moving’
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
‘Dense, lyrical and deeply unsettling’
New York Times
‘A fine balance between poetic tenderness and an unflinching account of the brutal realities of the day’
Guardian
‘Extraordinarily original’
Los Angeles Times
‘The prose is stunning, thanks to a masterful translation by Klara Glowczewska, and the characters are so fully fleshed that they seem to step off the page’
NPR
‘Grips the reader with the power of a high-class thriller’
Frankfurter Rundschau
‘All at once she thought that a life is only that which has passed. There is no life other than memory‘
In the Nazi-occupied Warsaw of 1943, Irma Seidenman, a young Jewish widow, possesses two attributes that can spell the difference between life and death: blue eyes and blond hair. Paired with false papers, she passes as the wife of a Polish officer, until one day an informer spots her on the street.
At times a dark lament, at others a sly and sardonic thriller, The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is the story of the thirty-six hours that follow Irma’s arrest and the events that lead to her dramatic rescue.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
‘Dense, lyrical and deeply unsettling’
New York Times
‘A fine balance between poetic tenderness and an unflinching account of the brutal realities of the day’
Guardian
‘Extraordinarily original’
Los Angeles Times
‘The prose is stunning, thanks to a masterful translation by Klara Glowczewska, and the characters are so fully fleshed that they seem to step off the page’
NPR
‘Grips the reader with the power of a high-class thriller’
Frankfurter Rundschau
‘All at once she thought that a life is only that which has passed. There is no life other than memory‘
In the Nazi-occupied Warsaw of 1943, Irma Seidenman, a young Jewish widow, possesses two attributes that can spell the difference between life and death: blue eyes and blond hair. Paired with false papers, she passes as the wife of a Polish officer, until one day an informer spots her on the street.
At times a dark lament, at others a sly and sardonic thriller, The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is the story of the thirty-six hours that follow Irma’s arrest and the events that lead to her dramatic rescue.
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Reviews
The prose is stunning, thanks to a masterful translation by Klara Glowczewska, and the characters are so fully fleshed that they seem to step off the page in order to communicate with the reader.
Brilliantly choreographed . . . blunt and hauntingly moving.
Dense, lyrical and deeply unsettling... Szczypiorski creates in these pages a kaleidoscopic portrait of life in Nazi-occupied Warsaw... By focusing on a couple of weeks in the lives of a dozen Warsaw residents Szczypiorski is able to delineate the consequences of World War II on a group of ordinary citizens, and the place of that war within the arc of Polish history... As Szczypiorski sees it, good and evil, heroism and cowardice, are not the stuff of high tragedy; they are simply elements of daily life, occasionally thrown into relief by events like war and persecution. Thanks to the trickery of luck and grace, innocence may be redeemed by a mercenary act, as easily as it may be saved through genuine charity and compassion; injustice may result from carelessness and bad timing, as easily as it may proceed from bigotry and hatred.
What happens to the beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is wholly believable, and carries the full impact of historic truth.
With a fine balance between poetic tenderness and an unflinching account of the brutal realities of the day, Szczypiorski shows us the intertwining lives of the few Poles, Jews, and Germans who risk everything to save her.
There are accidental heroes and inadvertent villains, surprising and unexpected switches that lend the book its extraordinary originality.
A masterpiece of modern prose which grips the reader with the power of a high-class thriller.
Szczypiorski recounts the eternal calvary of a Poland drunk with independence, but always enslaved and always crushed, in a sparse language as classical as that of Thomas Mann. Superb.
A rare find... An exceptional storyteller, Szczypiorski passionately re-creates the tumultuous war years for us, also providing insight into the current resurgence of Polish nationalism and Solidarity.
The authorial voice here - now gentle, now sardonic, but always piercingly omniscient - takes unique advantage of its eighties' perspective to create an unforgettable group portrait.
A masterful accomplishment, written with the kind of suspense that makes it impossible to put down.
Complex and convincing.
