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The Wedding
Paperback
Historical FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: Books from the Pond
Published: May 16 2026
Pages: 448
Weight: 1.31
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
International Impact Book Awards Distinguished Author for The Wedding.
It will be a day of joy, a day of laughter and dancing and fun: September 1, 1939, their wedding day. Brett Hampton, an American reporter, and Anya Laska, a Polish society girl, will declare to family and friends, to the entire world, their love for each other for all of eternity.
Brett, stationed in Europe to cover the rumblings of war, is introduced to Anya, a meeting that seems etched by fate. Falling madly in love the moment their eyes lock, dreams of a beautiful future together passes wordlessly between them. Engagement comes quickly. As soon as Anya's family will allow, they set their wedding date.
But life, as it so often does, sends Brett and Anya down a different path, down a far more dangerous road. Nazi Germany selects that same day to invade. The dark early morning skies awake with red and yellow and orange as bombs tear through the small Polish town of Wielun. Black smoke, almost invisible as it blends with the black of the predawn sky, billows into the air. They have but one choice as bombs explode around them, as fighter planes pepper the streets and rip Polish civilians apart with bullets: RUN!
But you can only run so long. Sooner or later, you have to stop and fight.
Author Note:
As the fortunes of war began to turn in 1944 and accelerated in 1945, Soviet forces swept across Poland, driving the Nazi army out. German officers were keenly aware that they could and likely would be prosecuted for war crimes, so they destroyed virtually all of their records as they fled before the Red Army onslaught.
Instead of liberation, however, the Polish people were imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, where they endured forty-six years of Soviet rule. During that time, the communist government destroyed any records that were not flattering to their regime. Consequently, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Poland finally won its freedom in 1991, there was little written history of Poland's participation in World War II.
The Polish people began piecing their World War II history together from diaries, personal letters, and interviews with those who lived through the war. I have endeavored to remain true to that history, the honesty of the Polish people. Almost all of the events depicted in this novel actually happened, though not necessarily in the same location or on the same date.
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