"London, 1938. Bookseller Gertie Bingham is facing difficult times, having just lost her beloved husband, Harry, and with a lingering sadness at never having been able to have a child of her own. Struggling to face running the bookshop she and Harry opened together, Gertie is preparing to sell up and move away when she is asked if she would be willing to take in a young Jewish refugee from Germany. Gertie is unsure and when sullen teenager Hedy Fischer...

"Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers's multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille...

It is 1938 in Europe as two vastly different families, separated by a huge religious and cultural chasm, await their fates, one with new hope, the other with apprehension as World War II and the Holocaust loom on the horizon. As a ten-year-old, Marile, a Catholic girl living with her family in Muhldorf, Germany proudly presents her Fuhrer with a bouquet of flowers, spends seven years in the Hitler Youth and later miraculously survives an Allied bombing...