Dora Brehm’s hands won’t stay still. They shake when she cradles a sleeping baby, when she stitches a doll’s dress, and—most dangerously—when the world around her begins to crack. After her husband, Heinrich, buys a parcel of wild land and drags the family toward an uncertain future, Dora makes the agonizing choice to leave little Annelise with her sister, Luise. It is only supposed to be temporary. War, however, has other plans.

Bombs, requisitions, and the hungry machinery of the Reich scatter Dora’s children across Germany. While Dora endures humiliation and violence at home, and her children grow up under the foreboding shadows of a war-mongering government, they learn that survival demands impossible choices. Across decades and borders, Dora never gives up on the dream of reuniting her family.

A novel of shame and stubborn tenderness, this is the story of a mother who refuses to be written out of her children’s lives. It asks: What must you risk to find the family you once had—and who will you become along the way?