Finding Poland

An expansive, insightful and moving history of the Polish experience during World War Two, and its lasting legacy

Both as a work of history and as an upmarket version of Who Do You Think You Are? this book is a great success

A fascinating blend of biography and history, which poignantly evokes the pain and loss attendant on exile, in both wartime and peace.

In Finding Poland, about his grandmother's deportation from Poland, he has a cracking story which he tells with compassion, verve, and the professional historian's restraint and accuracy

Moving book...Scholarly without being oppressive, Kelly's book reminds us how millions of people in the last century were uprooted by war and ideology, their expectations blown to the winds, their horizons utterly altered.

Matthew Kelly was born in Devon, educated at Oxford and now teaches at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Finding Poland which was published by Jonathan Cape in 2010 and The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882-1916.

Following the partitioning of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, Matthew Kelly's great grandmother and her two daughters were deported to the East. Thus began an extraordinary ordeal that took them, and many thousands like them, on a journey stretching from Siberia to Pakistan, and beyond. Their male relatives endured a parallel journey; arrested, exiled, and held as prisoners of war. Countless numbers were summarily executed by the Red Army. They saw the steppe, they were put to work in labour camps, they built sections of the trans-Siberian railway, they cleared forests, they toiled on collective farms. They knew hunger, exhaustion, disease and death. 
 
Persecuted by the Soviet Union, Poland was to become its unexpected ally following the German invasion in 1941. A new Polish army, 'The Anders Army' was assembled in Palestine. For a brief moment, in Kazakhstan, families were reunited, before being evacuated; to India, to Britain, to Mexico and East Africa; and from there, across the world. The experiences of these Poles had consequences far reaching and enduring, both to Poland, to Polish identity, and to the families that survived; reverberating through generations. 
 
These incredible stories remain largely untold. In Finding Poland Matthew Kelly embarks on a journey through his ancestor's footsteps, travelling through places they lived, and landscapes they survived, to provide an account of these extraordinary people and their unique history. Part memoir, history and travel book, it is also a profound meditation on the experience of displacement and exile, of the impact of such seismic disruption, and the deep legacies such trauma bequeaths.

Matthew Kelly

Kelly’s fine book, with its rigorous deconstructionist approach, acts as a better guide to the moor than any hikers’ map.

Will give you plenty to think about...covers subjects including biodiversity and social history, [and] conveys this mysterious moorscape's story from ancient rights to rewilding.

Impressively researched, and passionate… A valuable, heartfelt, well-written work.

Elegantly written, shrewdly observed, and a perfect read for those “staycationing” [at Devon and Cornwall] in particular.

An imaginative cultural history, exploring with élan geological, literary and historical associations.

Brilliant ... [Kelly] leaves no stone unturned in his bid to discover who thought what about Dartmoor and understand why the place has at times been regarded so differently.

Dartmoor - A British Landscape in Modern Times

Granite, a tough composite of quartz, feldspar and mica, is the stuff of Dartmoor, the most formidable of the five granite bosses punctuating Britain’s southwest peninsula. A miserable place of rain and bog or a sunny upland of exquisite natural beauty, here the elements are raw, the sky huge and nature seems ascendant. 
 
But it is no less a place made by human beings. Stone circles, crosses, dwellings and boundaries speak of the ancient, medieval and modern people that extracted a living from the moorscape and created what it is today. Where convicts are incarcerated, backpackers roam freely; where commoners graze livestock, the army is trained; where the National Park Authority exercises control, the Duchy of Cornwall claims ownership. And Dartmoor remains a place that provides. Reservoirs hold the water drunk by local people. China clay is extracted from its mineral reserves. Not long ago granite was quarried from its hillsides. 
 
What is modern Dartmoor and what should it be? Did druids officiate here? Can the bog be drained and crops grown? Is it the place for a prison? And what of its people’s future, and the fate of its ponies, cows and sheep? For three hundred years such questions have been asked of the moor. Quartz and Feldspar does not so much provide answers as unearth those who did and the arguments they provoked.

Matthew Kelly

Praise for Quartz and Feldspar

Kelly’s fine book, with its rigorous deconstructionist approach, acts as a better guide to the moor than any hikers’ map.

Will give you plenty to think about...covers subjects including biodiversity and social history, [and] conveys this mysterious moorscape's story from ancient rights to rewilding.

Impressively researched, and passionate… A valuable, heartfelt, well-written work.

Kelly’s fine book, with its rigorous deconstructionist approach, acts as a better guide to the moor than any hikers’ map.

Will give you plenty to think about...covers subjects including biodiversity and social history, [and] conveys this mysterious moorscape's story from ancient rights to rewilding.

Impressively researched, and passionate… A valuable, heartfelt, well-written work.

Kelly’s fine book, with its rigorous deconstructionist approach, acts as a better guide to the moor than any hikers’ map.

Will give you plenty to think about...covers subjects including biodiversity and social history, [and] conveys this mysterious moorscape's story from ancient rights to rewilding.

Impressively researched, and passionate… A valuable, heartfelt, well-written work.

Books by Matthew Kelly

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