Hope is one of the most important human emotions, allowing people in the direst circumstances to believe that there will be an end to their troubles, that tomorrow will come.

McCourt has written a splendid work of fiction, based on many historical facts, as a homage to the love and bravery of her extended Polish family. It tells the tumultuous story of Poland in the 20th century until 1953 when one member of her fictional family works on the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

Two brothers, Henryk and Adam Radecki, are at the heart of the story. It is Adam, while serving as a vet with the Tsar’s army in the widespread Russian empire, who came across villagers in Tashkent, close to the Tajikistan border. They had returned from the mountains with wagonloads of red tulips which they wove into crowns and necklaces for themselves.

Then they decorated a huge dead tree in the main square, covering it with the tulips until it had become a tulip tree around which they danced, as if it were a maypole. That image continued to surface in Adam’s mind, bringing him hope in his darkest moments. There were plenty of those for him and his first and second wives, plus family secrets too terrible to contemplate.

McCourt pays tribute to her husband for translating a Polish uncle’s diary; and to her husband’s late sister-in-law who shared her experiences of incarceration in Ravensbrück during World War II. Even a Polish character who helped save people hunted by the Gestapo during that war is based on a woman who lived in the same apartment building in Ostrowiec as her husband’s family.

This moving novel with its well-rounded characterisations ranges over more than 50 years, depicting life in the Russian Empire, Poland, and the Soviet Union, but the powerful, hopeful image that stays with the reader longest is that of the villagers and their tulip tree.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville