by Ward Just
First published 2003
A celebrated Hollywood director arrives in Berlin, hoping the changed city will restore his creative spark. The Wall has fallen, Germany has transformed, and he searches for something to reignite his filmmaking genius. Then he encounters a woman he never expected to see again. She is an actress who vanished from his movie set three decades earlier, leaving questions that haunted him through the years. Their reunion forces him to confront what happened during that earlier production and why she disappeared so suddenly. The director must navigate the complexities of their shared history while grappling with his own artistic ambitions. Berlin itself becomes a character in their story, a city rebuilt from its own fractured past. As memory collides with present reality, both must decide whether the past can be reconciled or if some mysteries should remain unsolved.
Genres: fiction, drama, literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Berlin, Germany
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
306 pages · Paperback · Mariner Books