What does it mean to be a peacemaker when there is no peace to be made?

After losing his job and his marriage, Chic Lucas - born Czeslaw Lukaszczyk - returns to the country his family fled. His grandfather died in Auschwitz. His father came out of Poland a changed man who never spoke of what he had seen. Chic comes back to understand why.

What he finds is a country that resists understanding. In contemporary Poland, the lines between heroism and complicity don't stay where history placed them. Jewish friends press restitution claims that are legally sound but economically devastating to Polish farmers who had no part in the original crimes. Skinheads march where monuments once stood. Lawyers argue over historical rights and wrongs. Two women - each representing a different answer to an impossible question - pull Chic in opposite directions. Caught between Jews and Christians and moral ambiguity, Lucas must find a way to reconcile the irreconcilable and become a peacemaker.

Stars and Crosses is a literary novel about the history you cannot resolve - only survive. It asks whether reconciliation is possible when both sides are right, and whether a person who understands every perspective can take any position at all.

For readers of Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander, and Olga Tokarczuk - fiction that refuses to simplify.

Curtis Urness grew up among survivors of World War II atrocities. He studied the Holocaust while earning BA and MA degrees in Creative and Professional Writing from the University of Missouri. This is his first novel.