Mosaic by Diane Armstrong

Mosaic by Diane Armstrong

This remarkable true story begins in the Polish city of Krakow in 1890 and spans one hundred years and four continents.

God blessed Lieba and the devout Jewish patriarch Daniel Baldinger with eleven children, and this richly textured portrait follows their lives down the decades, through the terrifying years of the Holocaust, to the present. Lives that personify the struggles and hopes of our century.

Mosaic is compelling storytelling at its best: from the fascinating detail of Polish-Jewish culture and the rivalries and dramas of family life, to its moving account of lives torn apart by war and persecution, this an extraordinary story of a family, and of one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage.

Diane Armstrong is a Holocaust survivor who came in Australia in 1948 as a kid from Poland. She is a bestselling novelist and award-winning journalist who has written five prior novels. Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations, her family story, was released in 1998 and was nominated for both the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the National Biography Award. It was released in the United States and Canada, and Amazon.com named it one of the finest memoirs of the year. The Journey of Their Lives: The Story of the SS Derna and Her Passengers was a finalist for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Prize for Non-Fiction in 2000.

Winter Journey, her first novel, was released in 2004 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Award in 2006. It has been published in the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Israel. Her second novel, Nocturne, earned the Society of Women Writers Novel Prize when it was published in 2008. In Poland, it was also nominated for a major literary award.

Empire Day, a postwar Sydney novel, was released in 2011. Diane is the mother of a son and a daughter, as well as three grandkids. She is based in Sydney. Jonathan Armstrong provided the photo.