Michelle Granas

Exiles and Barbarians Michelle Granas

What happens when a man discovers the woman he loves is connected with the world's worst business? Outwardly, Aniela is the perfectly dressed, much-admired daughter of wealthy businesspeople in Warsaw. Inwardly, she is suffering. Her colleagues at the ministry of disabilities consider her honorable and efficient, but no one understands her strange aloofness. Even her parents don't know she was once responsible for an incident with terrible consequences. Frozen with guilt, she avoids relationships while devoting herself to her job and to charitable work. A refugee is about to change all that, however. Yuri's main concern on arriving in the city is to survive as a homeless man, forget he was ever a professor, and keep himself and his child out of sight of the authorities. His other task is to speak to Aniela about the past. For all his desire to bring her relief, he manages to make everything much worse. First he falls headlong in love; then he discovers the details of her family business. And while he argues that what Aniela did is pardonable, what her family is up to is another matter altogether-one that puts Aniela beyond the pale, even for a migrant in desperate straits. Quite unfrozen, but with her world splintering around her, Aniela must ask herself what matters more-her conscience or her family? What are the limits of forgiveness? And what can she do to save Yuri?