The Call of the Tokay (Paperback)

In this memoir, Ivan Kruys describes his Russian family's three-and-a-half years in a Japanese concentration camp in Java during World War II. After they are liberated from the camp, his mother marries a British soldier and the family relocates to a farm in Lincolnshire, where eight-year-old Ivan and his sister struggle to adjust to a new life in post-war England. Grappling with an unfamiliar language and a new school, they are regarded with suspicion by the other students at a time when foreigners are virtually unknown in the rural countryside. As time goes by, however, Ivan and his sister learn to redefine their identities, and their determined mother manages to pull the family up from its working-class circumstances.