{"product_id":"last-mazurka-book-andrew-tarnowski-9781845131395","title":"The Last Mazurka","description":"The shot Count Hieronim Tarnowski fired on his wedding night in 1914, on the eve of the First World War, was like a tocsin that sounded the doom of his ancient Polish family. When in August 1939 his daughter Sophie saw blood pouring down the side of her train, she foresaw a terrible future and knew her idyllic world would be swept away. Thirty years later, when Count Hieronim's British grandson Andrew learned of the death of his mother - the beautiful, fragile and abused Chouquette - his sense of a lost identity deepened and he set out to rediscover the world from which he came. These moments punctuate an extraordinary tale of the downfall of a once-powerful family, which in turn mirrors the twentieth-century fate of a nation ravaged by invasions and crushed by tyranny. Before 1945, Poland, now a fledgling EU country, was an almost Tolstoyan world of wolf hunts and extravagant opulence, set alongside great poverty and a semifeudal peasantry, in a landscape of frozen fields and dark forests. Broken by war, it was reduced by communism to drab uniformity, and a way of life was lost forever. This world out of time is the setting for Andrew Tarnowski's memoir, \"The Last Mazurka\", a tale of loss and exile, love and violence, wandering and longing, told with poignancy and unexpected humour, and all the more powerful for being true in every word.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49558374220049,"sku":"GOR002859262","price":0.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1845131398.jpg?v=1751447267","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/last-mazurka-book-andrew-tarnowski-9781845131395","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}