I have Polish friends whose parents share a story similar to the family in this novel and I learned a great deal about not only life as a post war Pole in Britain, but also about the sufferings and repeated disappointments of the Polish people during the second world war. It's only with this knowledge that I begun to gain a deeper understanding of Polish culture, and of the difficulties in integrating into an alien society. It gets quite heavy in detail in the sections about the war, but it's definitely worth hanging in there to appreciate just what an effect this time had on a family generations later.