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About the author
Elisabeth Russell Taylor was born in 1930 in London, and grew up in Hampstead and St John's Wood. She is the award-winning author of six novels, three short-story collections, four books for children, five works of nonfiction, and numerous reviews and articles. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and has been translated into French, Dutch, and Lithuanian.
Summary
Every year Elisabeth Danzinger - an unassuming yet resolute mid-dle-aged woman - travels to the Danish island of Møn to spend one week at a lavish hotel called The Tamarisks, which was once, fifteen years ago in 1945, her family's beloved second home. With each annual visit, Elisabeth stays in the same room and unfailingly carries out the same routine: she walks familiar paths; she visits the local museum to peer at artefacts that once belonged to her family; she re-locates an old bench underneath which her fingers to find the long-ago carved initials 'E' and 'D'; and she even unscrews the panel around an old bath tub in order to retrieve a piece of crumbling paper on which is writ-ten her name and that of Daniel Eberhardt -Elisabeth's cousin, with whom she was very much in love.As Elisabeth revisits the places of childhood, her family's devastating his-tory is slowly revealed and we soon discover her annual pilgrimage is part of a long-standing family promise to meet again in Møn after the War. A promise that only she has fulfilled, and she has no reason to suspect this year will be any different from all the others.
Foreword
A vibrant and unsentimental novel about the love and resilience of a family damaged by war
