First published 2010
Eight-year-old Anna watches her mother drive away into thick fog on a cold January morning in 1961. A brief kiss, the sound of the car engine, and a wave through the icy windscreen mark their final goodbye. The adults around Anna refuse to discuss what happened. They pack away her mother's belongings and avoid mentioning her death. That same day, newspapers report the arrest of the Krogers, a spy ring whose members lived under false identities for years. Anna's brother Peter becomes fascinated by Cold War espionage stories and develops a theory about their mother, a refugee from East Germany. He believes she worked as an undercover agent and might still be alive somewhere. As months pass, Anna finds herself caught between her brother's elaborate theories and her own fading memories of their mother. She struggles to separate what really happened from the stories Peter constructs. The question haunts her: can anyone truly know who a person was after they die?
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, espionage
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: East Germany, Netherlands
Period: 1961
Paperback · Ambo|Anthos