This semi-autobiographical book is about the life of a young English woman who marries an ageing German aristocrat and in the marriage she focuses on her garden and children, at the same time running a country house. She also writes down her observations of the stuffy German aristocratic set using her razor sharp wit. Von Arnim was a successful author in her time and deserves to be re-discovered, this novel is a gem. In the first year of publication...

In 1939 Germany, Hanna Rombauer is sent to a "bride school" where she becomes increasingly disturbed by lessons of hatred, prejudice, and misogyny, and when she discovers a pregnant Jewish woman hiding near the school, she proposes a risky plan that would free them both. Germany, 1939. After her mother's death, Hanna Rombauer is unwillingly matched with an SS officer. The independence her mother fostered in her is considered highly inappropriate...

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Considered to be Turgenev's greatest love story, The Torrents of Spring is a bittersweet story of young love steered astray by passion. While traveling through Germany, nobleman Dmitri Sanin meets Gemma Roselli, a beautiful Italian girl who works in her family's shop. They fall in love as Sanin saves Gemma's brother life and defends her honor in a duel. Romance turns...

Amid the turbulence of World War II, a young German woman finds a precarious haven closer to the source of danger than she ever imagined--one that will propel her through the extremes of privilege and terror under Hitler's dictatorship. In early 1943, Magda Ritter's parents send her to relatives in Bavaria, hoping to keep her safe from the Allied bombs strafing Berlin. Young German women are expected to do their duty--working for the Reich or marrying...

Spanning a century and three continents, Even in Darkness tells the story of Klare Kohler, whose early years as a dutiful daughter of a prosperous German-Jewish family hardly anticipate the often-harrowing life she faces as an adult - a saga of family, a lover, two world wars, a concentration camps and the unconventional life she builds in post-war Germany. As the world changes around her, Klare makes boundary-crossing choices in order to protect...