First published 2009
Eight-year-old Anna watches her mother drive away into thick January fog in 1961. A quick kiss, the sound of the car engine, a wave through the icy windscreen, and she never sees her mother again. The adults around Anna cloak her mother's death in silence and pack away her belongings. That same morning, newspapers report the arrest of the Krogers, ordinary-seeming people who lived under false identities as Soviet spies. Anna's brother Peter becomes fascinated by Cold War espionage stories and develops a theory. Their mother fled East Germany as a refugee, but Peter believes she was actually an undercover spy who might still be alive somewhere. As months pass and life continues, Anna struggles to separate what really happened from Peter's elaborate fantasies. She wonders if her mother truly led a secret double life and questions how anyone can know who a person really was after death. Anna must navigate between memory and imagination as she tries to understand both her loss and her own identity.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, mystery, espionage
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, suspenseful
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: East Germany, January Fog
Period: 1961
Paperback · Bloomsbury Publishing PLC