A secret from the past can change your life for ever. A heart-breaking love story set in Cold War Berlin by the author ofThe Pursuit of HappinessandFive Days.
Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer living a very private life in Maine. Until, one wintry morning, his solitude is disrupted by the arrival of a package postmarked Berlin.
But what is more unsettling is the name accompanying the return address on the package: Petra Dussmann. For she is the woman with whom Thomas had an intense love affair twenty-five years before in a divided Berlin, where people lived fearfully under the shadows of the Cold War.
And so Thomas is forced to grapple with a past he has always kept hidden. For Petra Dussman was a refugee from the police state of East Germany. And her tragic secrets were to re-write both their destinies.
Douglas Kennedy's previous novels include the critically acclaimed bestsellersThe Big Picture,The Pursuit of Happiness,A Special RelationshipandThe Moment. He is also the author of three highly-praised travel books.The Big Picturewas filmed with Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve;The Woman in the Fifthwith Ethan Hawke and Kristen Scott Thomas.
His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. In 2007 he was awarded the French decoration of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2009 the inaugural Grand Prix de Figaro. Born in Manhattan in 1955, he has two children and currently divides his time between London, Paris, Berlin, Maine and New York.
