First published 2013
Spring 1945. Germany has fallen and the Allies have arrested Lore's parents. At seventeen, she becomes the sole guardian of her four younger siblings. With nowhere else to turn, Lore decides they must walk five hundred miles to reach their grandmother. The journey takes them through all four occupation zones, where every checkpoint threatens discovery and every stranger could turn them in. Lore carries forged papers and what little food she can find, while her youngest sibling grows weaker each day. The children move through a landscape of bombed cities and refugee camps, sleeping in abandoned buildings and begging for scraps. As they travel deeper into the shattered country, Lore begins to understand truths about her family and the war that force her to question everything she believed. The trek becomes more than survival. It transforms into a reckoning with the past that will determine who these children become in the new Germany taking shape around them.
Genres: historical-fiction, coming-of-age, world-war-ii, family-drama
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, found-family
Setting: Germany
Period: 1945
288 pages · Paperback · Vintage Canada
Content warnings: death, war