Svenja O'Donnell

Svenja's beautiful, aloof grandmother Inge never spoke about the past. All her family knew was that she had grown up in a city that no longer exists on any map: Königsberg in East Prussia. But when Svenja impulsively visits this windswept Baltic city, something unlocks in Inge and, finally, she begins to tell her story. It begins in the secret jazz bars of Hitler's Berlin. It is a story of passionate first love, betrayal, terror, flight, starvation and violence.

As Svenja teases out the threads of her grandmother's life, retracing her steps all over Europe, she realises that there is suffering here on a scale that she had never dreamt of. And finally, she uncovers a desperately tragic secret that her grandmother has been keeping for sixty years.