First published 2008
Anna Emmerich watches her privileged world crumble as Soviet forces close in on her family's Prussian estate in January 1945. The eighteen-year-old aristocrat's daughter faces an impossible choice: stay and face the advancing Red Army or flee west across a collapsing Third Reich. She chooses escape, joined by Callum Finella, the twenty-year-old Scottish prisoner of war she loves, who had been forced to work their farm. A Wehrmacht corporal named Manfred completes their unlikely trio, though he harbors a deadly secret. He is actually Uri Singer, a German Jew who escaped deportation to Auschwitz by assuming a dead soldier's identity. The three companions navigate bombed roads and desperate refugees as they push toward Allied lines along the Rhine. War strips away everything familiar, testing whether Anna and Callum's romance can survive starvation, cold, and constant danger. Their friendship with Manfred grows more complex as suspicions arise about his true identity. Each day brings new threats that could separate them forever or cost them their lives.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, war
Vibes: emotional, intimate, suspenseful
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, found-family
Setting: Prussia, Rhine, Soviet Union
Period: 1945
576 pages · Paperback · Random House Large Print
Content warnings: war