Colmar 1940: swastikas hang from lampposts, tanks are lined up outside the town hall, and twenty-one-year-old Marie-Claire is in love. She will do anything for her childhood friend Jacques, including spying on her German boss, Dietrich Kurtz. Anything to make Jacques see her in a new light, as something more than just a silly, shallow little girl.
But when Jacques rejects her, everything changes. Mortified and stung, Marie-Claire feels the need for revenge. She turns her back on those she loves and is catapulted into a new life.
Her young sister Victoire is aghast at her sister’s traitorous behaviour, not least because Marie-Claire is endangering Victoire’s own life-threatening mission, hiding Jewish refugees in their mother’s wine cellar.
But when Marie-Claire marries Kurtz, Victoire sees a way to resolve their differences, and make a strike against the Nazis. Kurtz, it turns out, works at the concentration camp up in the idyllic Vosges mountains: Natzweiler-Struthof, a Category 4 camp, a place of death and destruction. Together they plot a way out…
PRAISE FOR SHARON MAAS
“From the minute I opened this book I was completely enthralled. I couldn’t put it down.”
“Heart-breaking and beautifully written, this is a gripping tale of bravery.”