A young boy goes missing during a workers' strike in 1980s Communist Poland, unravelling a chain of events which will touch people across decades and continents. Joanna, a young journalist in Warsaw, is still looking for her brother, who's been missing for over twenty years. Matty, a high-flying London city financier is struggling with relationship problems and unexplained panic attacks. And in Chicago, an old man is slowly dying in a nursing home, losing his battle with liver cancer. What connects them? As the mystery begins to unravel, the world of the three protagonists is turned upside down. But can they find each other before time runs out? A poignant historical novel about loss and self-discovery told with compassion and unflinching honesty.
Industry Reviews
"The Walls Came Down is the stunning debut novel from Ewa Dodd... Expertly written, the characters are well rounded... The poignancy of the story is extremely powerful, and left me with a warm feeling in my heart. Definitely a page turner." White Shadow in the Basement
"The Walls Came Down is a page-turner; an engaging and fast-paced story of a child disappearance that spans countries, systems and human frailties... Well written, The Walls Came Down is a gripping debut novel that brings another author to the excellent company of Polish-English writers such as Anya Lipska and Anna Taborska dark horror storytelling." Katarzyna Zechenter, a poet, the author of In the Shadow of the Tree and a lecturer at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
"The Walls Came Down is a tense and moving tale of love and loss that grips the reader from start to finish. Shifting between contemporary London and Chicago and the Solidarity strikes of 1988, this compelling story shows us how a momentary act of selfishness can ruin several lives. It is also a reminder that the collapse of communism started not in Germany or in the Soviet Union but in the shipyards and mines of Poland, where the workers faced down a dictatorship that claimed to rule in their name, just as the people of Leipzig later would in 1989." Fiona Rintoul, journalist and author of the prize-winning The Leipzig Affair