I picked up one of my Christmas presents, We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter, in April and couldn’t put it down – gripped from page one of this novel based on the true story of one Polish Jewish family in the Second World War.

It follows five siblings, their partners and their parents, from 1939 in their home town of Radom to just after the end of the war, and is an extraordinary story of survival against appalling odds. There were 30,000 Jewish people in the city at the start of the war and only 300 survived. The journeys this one family went on included being exiled to a bitter Siberian winter, going into hiding in a remote farmhouse, escaping one of the Radom ghettos before it was ‘liquidated’, being in Warsaw during the uprising, crawling across fields to bypass the Nazis, cowering in basements during the bombing, being disguised as Catholic in a convent, escaping across the mountains to Italy, making their way on a treacherous journeys to Brazil, I could go on.

If it wasn’t based on a true story, you wouldn’t believe what they went through and how they managed to survive, to find each other and to build new lives after the war. This is a truly remarkable book and one that will stay with me.