Agate Nesaule, who in 1995 wrote the award-winning memoir A Woman in Amber, returns to familiar territory with her first novel, released this month by the University of Wisconsin Press.

In Love with Jerzy Kosinski tells the story of Anna Dūja, a refugee from Latvia who flees first to a Displaced Persons camp and then to the United States where “she finds herself in a different kind of captivity on isolated Cloudy Lake, Wisconsin, living with her disarming but manipulative husband, Stanley,” according to a publisher’s press release.

Dūja, according to the publisher, is “inspired by the transformation of Polish-Jewish émigré Jerzy Kosinski from persecuted wartime escapee to celebrity author in America.” She “slips away from Stanley and Cloudy Lake in small steps: learning to drive, making friends, moving to Madison, falling in love, and learning to forgive.”

Nesaule, who lives in Madison, Wis., is a professor emerita of English and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. She won the American Book Award in 1996 for A Woman in Amber. The memoir told her story of flight from Latvia, the experience of life as a refugee and then her struggles in America. The memoir was later translated into Latvian under the title Sieviete dzintarā.

The hardbound version of In Love with Jerzy Kosinski has a suggested retail price of USD 24.95.