An Act of Peace by Ann Widdecombe
The story of Klaus-Pierre Dessin, the illegitimate son of a young French woman and a high-ranking German soldier, who fall in love in Paris during the Nazi occupation in WWII. His father is killed in the German retreat and his mother is faced with bringing up her young son on her own. Told in the first person, KP starts in 1989 as the Berlin wall falls and recollects life from the time as a toddler he and his mother took refuge with an aunt in Provence after her Catholic family in Paris had disowned her. The suffering of taunts and bulleying from French children - 'the German brat, the German brat' and the eventual move to KP's German family near Lubeck on the West German side of the West-East German border. There on an estate recovering from war KP learns about life. He is clever, multi-lingual, goes to university in Heidelberg and also in England (Oxford) where he discovers that people are similar regardless of nationality. And he falls in love....
she can spin a good story... warm in tone and wryly observant. -- Kate Saunders * THE TIMES *
It's a good read with a convincing plot -- Anne Sebba * THE JEWISH CHRONICLE *
Ann Widdecombe's impressive novel...... Widdecombe skilfully and often movingly uses the boy's struggle with his own painful history to throw light on the troubled years between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. -- Margaret Walters * THE SUNDAY TIMES *
It's a good read with a convincing plot -- Anne Sebba * THE JEWISH CHRONICLE *
Ann Widdecombe's impressive novel...... Widdecombe skilfully and often movingly uses the boy's struggle with his own painful history to throw light on the troubled years between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. -- Margaret Walters * THE SUNDAY TIMES *
Ann Widdecombe is best known as Member of Parliament and for her broadcasting and journalism, but had long had ambitions to write novels, which led to her writing THE CLEMATIS TREE. She was born in 1947 and grew up moving around the country and abroad with her parents as her father served in the Admiralty. She was educated at the Universities of Birmingham and Oxford. She now lives in south London and in the picturesque village of Sutton Valence, Kent. She was a Home Office minister in John Major's government, Shadow Home Secretary under William Hague's leadership of the Tory party. She writes her novels on long train journeys and in Singapore when she visits her Chinese nanny.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780297829584 |
| ISBN 10 | 0297829580 |
| Title | An Act of Peace |
| Author | Ann Widdecombe |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Orion Publishing Co |
| Year published | 2005-07-14 |
| Number of pages | 352 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |