Three novels, three unforgettable experiences…
A buried secret and a lifetime of guilt born in the dark heart of Nazi Germany
England, 2001. Elizabeth has always suspected her mother harbours a secret from her time as a young woman in Nazi Germany. But her mother, suffering from dementia, is lost to her now.
When Elizabeth stumbles across a Nazi certificate amongst her parent’s paperwork, it forces her to question the very foundations of her 1950s childhood and her first love; a childhood, she now realises, was built on lies.
Elizabeth’s quest to find the truth leads her to Germany where she’s met with a wall of silence. She knows that beyond this wall, is the truth, a truth that exists deep within the dark and twisted soul of Hitler’s Germany.
Germany, 1944. 18-year-old Hannah, beautiful and naive, volunteers to work in a home for evacuated children. But Doctor Heinkel, a loyal Nazi, decrees that there’s a better way for Hannah to serve the Fatherland.
Drawn further into the doctor’s distorted world, Hannah only realises what’s expected of her when it’s too late. Confronted with evil, Hannah is faced with an impossible choice…
What if a violin could tell the story of its owners across a century?
One violin. One curse. One hundred years.
Germany 1871. A violin of pure perfection. Crafted with love by its creator and set to make him and his family a fortune. His wife, Katharina, is duped by a powerful businessman and their dreams of a better life lie shattered.
Distraught, Katharina wishes her husband had never created his masterpiece and in anger places a curse on the instrument. For the following 100 years, anyone who plays her husband’s violin will die an untimely death.
And so begins the poignant journey of the violin through the century.
Eight linked stories set against the brutality of the 20th Century. From the trenches of the First World War to the evil of Nazism; the Second World War and the horror of the Holocaust, through to the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall.
Fortunes rise and fall in a terrible refrain… Unrequited love, friends betrayed, terrible secrets exposed, families torn apart. Can the soaring purity of the music the violin produces save them?
Who will survive the curse of the violin? Eight people scattered across the century, each cursed by a single violin and its everlasting Song of Sorrow.
An ordinary boy, a murderous regime. This is how it happened…
Berlin, 1933. 14-year-old Felix Stoltenberg is desperate to be friends with Klaus Beck to the point he defies his anti-Nazi parents and joins the Hitler Youth. As the years pass and Hitler’s grip on the nation tightens, Felix and Klaus’ boyhood pranks take a sinister turn.
But nothing prepares Felix and Klaus for the eruption of anti-Semitic violence. Felix can no longer stand aside and observe. He is forced to participate – whatever the price to his mother and father.
1942. Now, a young, idealistic man, still devoted to the Nazi cause, Felix’s life and sense of identity fall apart when he falls in love with Stella, a Bohemian artist.
Stella is beautiful, she is talented, she is a woman of mystery and ideas … and she is Jewish.
