Nazis, spies, romance, and murder collide in prewar eastern Europe in a mesmerizing historical novel by the award-winning author of Oliva’s Garden.

It’s 1936. The seaside-resort village of Split on the Adriatic coast bustles. The tourist spots are booming, passenger steamers dot the harbor, and Jewish émigrés have found tenuous refuge from persecution. But as war in Europe looms, Split is also a nest of spies, fascists, and smugglers—and now, a locale suspiciously scouted by a German Reich film crew. Then one summer morning it becomes the scene of a murder investigation when a corpse is found entangled in fishing nets in the port.

With so many suspects from all walks of life and with a myriad of motives at a time when tensions are boiling over, crime superintendent Mario Bulat has only rumors to follow. Political archrivals will take advantage of the crime. Local lovers will become embroiled in it. And a propagandist filmmaker will find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. War is coming, and for some in Split, it’s already here.

Alida Bremer is a writer, literary translator, editor, and cultural mediator between southeast Europe and the German-speaking world. She studied theory of literature, romance studies, Slavic studies, and German studies, and she earned her PhD in comparative literature. Her essays, columns, articles, stories, and poems appear in newspapers, magazines, and online (including Der Spiegel, Lettre International, Schreibheft, Zeit Online, Die Horen, and Manuskripte) and have been translated into multiple languages. She is the author of the autobiographical novel Oliva’s Garden and Split, a nominee for the Alfred Döblin Prize. For her literary translations, she was awarded several prestigious German prizes, including the Internationaler Literaturpreis in 2018. For more information, visit www.alida-bremer.de/english.