Joanna Hempel, author.
Writer and weaver of great history with human lives.
The author, with Quintus.
The historical novelist.
Joanna Hempel, formerly one of Australia’s leading playwrights for young people, turned to writing historical novels after researching her family roots in Eastern Europe. Volume 1 of her trilogy Chronicles of War & Love: WANDA has been published in Poland by ZNAK.
Chronicles of War and Love is the fictionalized saga of her extended family. Volume 1 WANDA covers the Eastern Front during WWI and the Russian Revolution; Volume 2 GEORGE deals with the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 and leads into WWII; Volume 3 covers WWII and the Cold War.
"It's hard to break away from this work that so vividly intertwines great history with human fates. This novel touches the heart. I am entranced!"
— Barbara Wysoczanska, author of the best-seller A Nazi's Fiancée
“Great stories demand great narration. They are nothing without full-blooded heroes who love, yearn, fear and fight. Joanna Hempel does not allow her ancestors to fade in photograph albums. She shows them as they are tested, weaving their trials into an enormous tapestry of European history. If you want to understand the Eastern Front during the First World War- this is the only way! It is impossible to stop reading."
— Tomasz Kosiorek, journalist, psychologist, Polish Radio
A shorter version of Volume 1 was published in English as Feet of Wax: Love & War on the Eastern Front 1914-1918.
