Despite their drastically different social standings, members of the families interact frequently throughout the generations, sometimes as allies and sometimes as adversaries.

Michener was hired by a television company to travel to a foreign country to shoot a documentary.

Like Michener's other works, he includes an acknowledgments section at the beginning of the book; however due to the political turmoil in Poland at the time, Michener decided not to include the names of the people he traveled with for fear of persecutions against them.

He writes: "Normally, as I have done in my other novels, I would list their names, their impressive occupations, their achievements in research and scholarship, but I cannot ascertain whether in the present climate this would hurt or help them."

The book starts with an acknowledgements section, maps of the location of the plot, an explanation of which characters are fictional as opposed to which ones are historical, and a description of the hierarchy of Polish society.