Jan G.

Malcolm Findley was a strange little man with a large, pale, half-bald dome of a bulbous head, a trailing mane of silver-white hair, and a pair of Belgian-made golden pince-nez eyeglasses. He was also brilliant and this aspect of his personality so overshadowed the former that he was considered a colossus. Born the eldest son of a poor fisherman on the Isle of Lewis in the windswept northwest of Scotland, he grew up in a stone cottage with a thatched roof that didn’t blow away in the frequent gales only because it was held down by a net of hemp ropes weighted at the ends by stones. As a ...

In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive.

Germany, 1942. Franciscan friar Anton Starzmann is stripped of his place in the world when his school is seized by the Nazis. He relocates to a small German hamlet to wed Elisabeth Herter, a widow who seeks a marriage - in name only - to a man who can help raise her three children. Anton seeks something too - atonement for failing to protect his young students from the wrath of the Nazis. But neither he nor Elisabeth expects their lives to be shaken once again by the inescapable rumble of war.