
The Girl From Berlin
A Novel
St. Martin's Press · Print & ebook · September 17, 2019
Ronald H. Balson's The Girl from Berlin is the winner of the Book Club category for the 2018 National Jewish Book Award.
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- Who it’s for
- A disputed Tuscan home and hidden German manuscript connect present-day suspense with wartime history.
- Themes
- Jewish family under suspicion, War and displacement, Redemption and hope
- Genres
- World War II & Holocaust, Jewish Fiction, Private Eye Fiction
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For younger readers: The Light in Hidden Places, They Went Left, The Paper Girl of Paris
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Start with this bookAbout this book
Ronald H. Balson's The Girl from Berlin is the winner of the Book Club category for the 2018 National Jewish Book Award. In this new novel, Liam and Catherine come to the aid of an old friend and are drawn into a property dispute in Tuscany that unearths long-buried secrets An old friend calls Catherine Lockhart and Liam Taggart to his famous Italian restaurant to enlist their help.
Continue reading
His aunt is being evicted from her home in the Tuscan hills by a powerful corporation claiming they own the deeds, even though she can produce her own set of deeds to her land. Catherine and Liam’s only clue is a bound handwritten manuscript, entirely in German, and hidden in its pages is a story long-forgotten… Ada Baumgarten was born in Berlin in 1918, at the end of the war. The daughter of an accomplished first-chair violinist in the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic, and herself a violin prodigy, Ada’s life was full of the rich culture of Berlin’s interwar society. She formed a deep attachment to her childhood friend Kurt, but they were torn apart by the growing unrest as her Jewish family came under suspicion. As the tides of history turned, it was her extraordinary talent that would carry her through an unraveling society turned to war, and make her a target even as it saved her, allowing her to move to Bologna—though Italy was not the haven her family had hoped, and further heartache awaited. What became of Ada? How is she connected to the conflicting land deeds of a small Italian villa? As they dig through the layers of lies, corruption, and human evil, Catherine and Liam uncover an unfinished story of heart, redemption, and hope—the ending of which is yet to be written.
History, Uncovered
A disputed Tuscan home and hidden German manuscript connect present-day suspense with wartime history.
Come here for
- A property dispute braided with a buried wartime story
- Interwar Berlin, Jewish family history, and a violin prodigy
Expect
- A hidden manuscript linking the land dispute to a forgotten story
- Heartache and corruption, with room for redemption and hope
Where it sits
| World War II & Holocaust | 98% |
|---|---|
| Jewish Fiction | 55% |
| Private Eye Fiction | 35% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Private Eye Fiction
- Historical Thrillers
- Legal Thrillers
- Authors
- Ronald H. Balson
- Publisher
- St. Martin's Press
- Published
- September 17, 2019
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Jewish family under suspicion · War and displacement · Redemption and hope
- Reading lane
- Private Eye Fiction