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Overview
With over 200,000 copies sold in the UK, a Richard & Judy pick, rights sold in 19 countries, called “riveting” and “mesmerizing,” this is a cinematic debut from a gifted new writer. Based on real family events, Danny Scheinmann’s novel paints a dramatic portrait of two epic love stories.
1992: Traveling through South America with his girlfriend, Leo wakes up in a hospital to find his girlfriend is dead. He blames himself for the tragedy and is sucked into a spiral of despair. But a surprising secret leads Leo to discover something that will change his life forever.
1917: Moritz is a POW fugitve, with seven thousand kilometers of the Russian steppes separating him from his first love, whose memory has kept him alive through carnage and captivity. The war may be over, but he now faces a perilous journey and the insecurity of whether his love is still waiting.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Young Leo Deakin wakes in a hospital in Ecuador in 1992 to discover that his girlfriend, Eleni, has died in a bus crash. Overwhelmed with guilt and grief, Leo returns to life seeking the meaning behind his new predicament: left behind, haunted by his dead lover and ambivalent over whether he should shake her hold on him. In an effort to break through his son's grief, Leo's dad imparts the tale of Leo's grandfather Moritz Daniecki, who as a WWI POW escaped across the Siberian wasteland to make it back to the woman he loved. The parallel powers of love and grief form the meeting points of these mirror sagas, which Scheinmann combines to remarkable effect. Leo and Moritz are tender, deeply feeling, put-upon characters who never descend into mawkishness; indeed, readers will feel most for Leo when he's at his worst. Dotted with strange scientific trivia, this beautiful debut novel provides deft moments of poignancy and surprise. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Library Journal
This British first novel tells two tales, which converge at the end. In Ecuador, a young man named Leo Deakin awakes in a rural hospital after a bus crash to discover that his girlfriend, Eleni, has died in the accident, leaving Leo heartbroken and distraught. He insists on staying close to her corpse, as it is embalmed and then flown back to a Greek island to be buried near her family. He returns to England and, consumed by grief, tries to begin living again. The other story begins in Ulanow, Poland, where a young Jewish man named Moritz Daniecki falls in love with a beautiful and wealthy young woman named Lotte just before the beginning of World War I. They barely have time to declare their affection for each other before Moritz is swept up into the army of the Austrian Empire and its conflict. Moritz is captured by the Russians and sent to a POW camp in remote Siberia. As the war grinds on thousands of miles away, the Russian political situation descends into the maelstrom of the revolution, and in the confusion Moritz and a companion walk out of the camp and begin a trek back to Poland and Lotte. Leo, having made a mess of his personal life arrives back at his parents' house, and it is from a story his father tells him that the connections in the novel are made clear. Absorbing and emotionally engaging, this novel, evidently popular in England, should have broad appeal and is recommended for collections that have a demand for quality historical fiction and moving human interest stories.
—Jim Coan