Adam C. Frosh’s scrupulously researched novel is inspired by the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Along with its broad sweep of characters and timeframe (1939-1943), it portrays intricate ambiguities underscoring war’s horrors, with timely examinations of Jewish and national identity, fascist tactics, and more.

Frosh’s story, with fictional and real characters, begins before Germany’s occupation of Poland. Lovers Natalia, who is Christian, and Jakub, who is Jewish, are thwarted by Natalia’s impending marriage to Marek, a successful businessman deemed a good match by both party’s fathers. Natalia notes that “Family was everything. Marrying Jakub would tear it apart, irreversible hurt to everyone she loved.” Only after she’s engaged does she discover Marek’s cruelty and ruthlessness.

The love story binds many plot threads. In 1940, the Nazis confine Warsaw’s Jews to a ghetto with increasingly horrific conditions. “Emaciated, frozen children” dressed in rags wander streets “where bodies were heaped in doorways.” Disease and starvation rage. The ghetto is headed by a Jewish council ostensibly led by Adam Czerniaków, a real historical figure. But Czerniaków is merely a puppet struggling to help his people, who despise him.

Militant Jewish groups bicker over ideologies. Differing personalities and loyalties wrestle within SS hierarchies, and outside the ghetto, Jakub’s doctor brother struggles with hospital supply and energy shortages as Nazi incursions explode into battle.

Frosh’s fiction smoothly (except for rushed final scenes) integrates historical detail and describes atrocities from fresh perspectives, noting, for example, burial crews wearing gas masks that “encased their faces in rubber, their fogged lenses and rasping filters like alien creatures from a Karel Čapek novel.”

This is grim material, but comedy offers relief. Jakub’s mother, a well-rounded but archetype Jewish Mother, uses creative Yiddish terms, while a Christian comedian jokes in his standup act: “[W]e have food only for half our unit!’ ‘All right, we shall eat after the attack.’”

Readers will find this an engrossing story, fueled by impressive research and characters they will care deeply about.