This was a beautiful, sweet, nostalgic, heartbreaking story about how people are affected by their feelings for those they love. Mali is packing up her mother's things after she dies and finds herself reading letters that give her a whole new perspective on the past and on her relationship with her mother. Mali knew how alone and empty she felt when she missed her mother, and now she learns about the events that affected her mother, a Gerrman Jew during the Holocaust. This is a quick easy read but it's staying with me, in a good way.
Thanks to NetGalley and Black Rose Writing for letting me read this.

A fast and very interesting read, not quite what I was expecting and thus not something I’d normally read, but I am glad I did read it! It might be the fault of the kindle edition but occasionally it did take a few lines at the start of each chapter to figure out if this was Mali narrating, or one of Eva’s letters, and the timeline seemed to jump around a bit in ways that I think would have been instantly clearer in a print edition.

Eva was born in Berlin but her family managed to escape to London in 1939, and though it is mentioned that she is evacuated to the countryside there is very little written about this. There’s also very little mention of the Holocaust as of course the family left Germany very early on, and this is more a story of Eva’s adult life and Mali’s life, luckily both characters I found very interesting.

A story that time jumps from WWII and today. After finding her mother’s old letters, Mali sees what life was like for her family during the war. Great story.

The story is about a woman who is trying to pack up her mother's apartment after her mother has died and in doing so, she finds a number of letters that her mother has written to her to explain why she left her and her father when she was a very young girl. The mother had been a Jew in Germany during Hitler's rise and so much of her life was affected by the after effects of living through that time in history. This story brought back a lot of emotion for me as I remembered having to clean out my mother's house after her death and finding things that I had no idea what they were or why my mother had saved them. My family did not have the traumatic history that Mali's did so I can only imagine how much more severe her reaction was to what she found.

Thank you to Black Rose Writing and NetGalley for the digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
This novel is so beautifully written, so poignant and thought provoking, I read it in 24 hours. It is compelling reading, I felt for Mali and her mother Eva so much, I haven’t read a mother daughter relationship explored so well previously, it’s so sad and touching. The history of Jewish people is tragic, and though I want to learn more I often find it too upsetting. I appreciated that in this book the ripple effects on those caught up in Hitlers awful sadistic times are highlighted, rather than only the experiences in the camps. I liked the manner in which the information was passed to Mali after her mothers death in letters written over time, and could totally understand how that was easier for Eva than speaking her experiences directly to her daughter.
Thank you Jacquie, this is a gem of a book, I look forward to your next one.