Publisher's Synopsis
Polish boy Jozef could not know that the coming of the Russians would mean him losing everything he holds dear: his family, his freedom, his country. Surviving imprisonment, starvation and disease, suddenly hope and salvation - for him and six others - is at hand. Yet to reach it the party must undertake a perilous journey across two thousand kilometres of Siberian wilderness.Partly inspired by the author's late father's and grandparents' real-life experiences, this fictional story centres on a relatively unreported and unexplored period during the Second World War, when Russia invaded and annexed eastern Poland, forcibly 'resettling' over a million civilians and subjecting them to brutal conditions in gulags in Siberia and elsewhere.The cruel consequences of war and Poland's ruthless occupation by Russia are seen through the eyes of twelve-year-old Jozef Domrowski. It's Sept 1939. Germany has invaded Poland. Jozef lives on a farm in the east of the country until the Russians invade and remove Jozef and his family to a labour camp in northern Siberia. Here he must face cruelty, hardships and loss beyond anything he has experienced before. Eventually freed, Jozef and his friends find themselves abandoned. Jozef must now lead his seven-strong band of youngsters across the vast wilderness of Siberia two thousand kilometres south to safety and the newly formed Polish army in Totskoye. The novel is a physical and emotional journey of personal discovery, of sorrow and hope, during which Jozef will grow from naïve farm boy to young man, encountering the angels and the demons of war and exposing those at odds within him.Seven Seeds of the Sunflower is D. M. Mitchell at his historical best, moving away from his trademark thriller, and is in the tradition of Vanessa Curtis' The Earth is Singing or, more recently, that of Heather Morris' bestselling Cilka's Journey. It is an epic tale of hope and the resilience of the human spirit.