Bøker av Rachel Seiffert

To be truly alive means having to make choices. To be truly alive is also, quite simply, to love.Northern Germany, 1945. Dead of night and dead of winter, a boy sees strangers - forced labourers - fleeing across the heathland: shawls and skirts in the snowfall. The end days are close, war brings risk and chance, and Benno is witness to something he barely understands.Later, when peace finally arrives in his small town, the adults close ranks, closing their mouths and minds to the winter's events. They all have their reasons. They all hope [the worst is over, and] that in any case the labour camp on the outskirts will surely be closed now. Benno swallows his secret [about the women workers], keeping it even from Freya, his schoolyard companion.But with peace come soldiers - English this time - and Red Cross staff officers. Ruth is on her first posting from London, arriving in the town only to uncover the camp and its remaining workers, abandoned there at war's end. She is given charge of them, and also the many new arrivals: more forced labourers from across the heathland and beyond, all with their own losses and stories, and all housed in a new camp on the site of the old. Among these refugees are children - Sasha and Yeva - waiting and waiting for word of their mother. Where could she be now?For Benno, too, questions are circling. Freya has heard whispers - about the camp and that snow night and the strangers - enough to be wondering about Benno and his silence. When is an act of kindness an act of betrayal?

1945. Dead of night and dead of winter; war brings a stranger to the door; a family is tricked into a act of compassion and danger.

The new novel from Rachel Seiffert, author of the Booker-shortlisted The Dark Room.

To love someone, need you know everything about them?When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but serious relationship. When Alice's widowed grandfather begins to tell Joseph about his RAF experiences in 1950s Kenya, something still raw is tapped in Joseph;

The Dark Room tells the stories of three ordinary Germans: Helmut, a young photographer in Berlin in the 1930s who uses his craft to express his patriotic fervour; and, fifty years later, Micha, a young teacher obsessed with what his loving grandfather did in the war, struggling to deal with the past of his family and his country.

From the title piece, in which a young biologist conceals his discoveries at a polluted river from a local woman, to the family aided by an enemy in 'The Crossing', to the old man weighing his regrets in 'Francis John Jones, 1924. This title captures the lives of author's characters in their most essential, secret moments.