Category: Historical Fiction

Anna has returned from visiting her mother. Restless and unable to sleep, she wanders through her parents’ house, revisiting the scenes of her childhood. In a cupboard drawer, folded and pushed away from sight, she finds a sepia photograph of her grandmother, Hanna, whom she remembers as old and forbidding, a silent stranger enveloped in a huge pleated black dress. Now, looking at the features Anna recognises as her own, she realises she is looking at a different woman from the one of her memory. Set against the majestic isolation of the Scandinavian lakes and mountains, this is more than a story of three Swedish women. It is a moving testament of a time forgotten and an epic romance in every sense of the word.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   299 pages )

This immensely powerful novel follows four generations of the Bindel family as they fight for survival in a hostile world. From imperial Russia in 1825 they head towards Western Europe, returning finally to modern Russia – where the persecution of the Jews continues.The Bindel family are knit by unbreakable bonds of love and loyalty, bonds which survive conscription into the Tsarist army in the 1830s, the Odessa pogrom of 1871, emigration to the Welsh valleys and to Germany, the Nazis, the concentration camps and the Gulags.

( from the sleeve,  502 pages )