The Tailor of Inverness

Author: Matthew Zajac

Memoirs

Published on 30 September 2026 by LUATH PRESS LTD in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 288 pages
132 x 198 x 24mm | 260g

The Tailor of Inverness is a story of journeys, of how a boy who grew up on a farm in Galicia (Eastern Poland, now Western Ukraine) came to be a tailor in Inverness. His life spanned most of the 20th century.

His story is not straightforward. He was taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1939 and forced to work east of the Urals, then freed in an amnesty after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. He then joined the thousands of Poles who travelled to Tehran, then Egypt, to be integrated into the British Army, fighting in North Africa and Italy. He was then resettled in Britain in 1948, joining his brother in Glasgow.

This is the story he told.

But was the tailor really who he said he was?