With the rise of the Berlin Wall, twelve-year-old Gerta finds her family suddenly divided. She, her mother, and her brother Fritz live on the eastern side, controlled by the Soviets. Her father and middle brother, who had gone west in search of work, cannot return home. Gerta knows it is dangerous to watch the wall, to think forbidden thoughts of freedom, yet she can't help herself. She sees the East German soldiers with their guns trained on their...

Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1936, the Schwarts immigrate to a small town in upstate New York. Here the father-a former high school teacher-is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. When local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty, give rise to an unthinkable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca heads out into America. Embarking upon an extraordinary odyssey of erotic risk and ingenious self-invention,...

657 days ago Meg's British father left their home in France to fight the Nazis, leaving some codes in a jar for her to decipher, and Meg and her French mother moved to the Perche, a region in France near Normandy known for its forests; now Meg watches the German soldiers in town, and sometimes carries messages for the French resistance--but suddenly things have gotten much more dangerous: there is a wounded British officer hiding in her grandmother's...

"A courageous young noblewoman risks her life to hide French resistance fighters; seventy years later, her granddaughter visits the family's abandoned chateau and uncovers shocking secrets from the past. Gisele Duchant guards a secret that could cost her life. Tunnels snake through the hill under her family's medieval chateau in Normandy. Now, with Hitler's army bearing down, her brother and several friends are hiding in the tunnels, resisting the...

Lost in the Black Forest, Otto meets three mysterious sisters and finds himself entwined in a prophecy, a promise, and a harmonica--and decades later three children, Friedrich in Germany, Mike in Pennsylvania, and Ivy in California find themselves caught up in the same thread of destiny in the darkest days of the twentieth century, struggling to keep their families intact, and tied together by the music of the same harmonica.

Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined--an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Hazards of Good Breeding. Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany's defeat, Marianne...

In 1943 ten-year-old Lida is torn away from her home in the Ukraine, separated from her little sister Larissa, and sent to a slave labor camp in Germany, but when she is moved and set to making bombs she sees a way to strike back at the Nazis.