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: she has blue eyes and blond hair.

With these, and a set of false papers, she has slipped out of the ghetto, passing as the wife of a Polish officer, until one day an informer spots her on the street and drags her off to the Gestapo.

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 as the last of Warsaw’s Jews are about to meet their deaths in the burning ghetto.

‘Dense, lyrical and deeply unsettling… By focusing on a couple of weeks in the lives of a dozen Warsaw residents and occasionally leaping forward into the convulsions of recent Polish politics, Mr. 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. Though the novel is in many ways an anguished and loving elegy for the Poland that sustained the convulsions of World War II, the book also takes an uncompromising look at the anti-Semitism and class prejudices that have flourished so tragically in that country - and the attendant legacy of fear and hate and guilt’

MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NEW YORK TIMES