The Daughter's Tale
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4.0 • 122 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Based on the true story of the Nazi massacre of a French village in 1944, an unforgettable tale of love and redemption from the bestselling author of The German Girl.
Berlin, 1939: Bookstore owner and recent widow Amanda Sternberg is fleeing Nazi Germany with her two young daughters, heading towards unoccupied France. She arrives in Haute-Vienne with only one of her girls. Their freedom is short-lived and soon they are taken to a labour camp.
New York City, 2015: Elise Duval, eighty years old, receives a phone call from a woman recently arrived from Cuba bearing messages from a time and country that she's long forgotten. A French Catholic who arrived in New York after World War II, Elise and her world are forever changed when the woman arrives with letters written to Elise from her mother in German during the war, unravelling more than seven decades of secrets.
Inspired by one of the most shocking atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II, the 1944 massacre of all the inhabitants of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in the south of France, The Daughter's Tale is a beautifully crafted family saga of love, survival and hope against all odds.
‘Breathtakingly threaded together from start to finish with the sound of a beating heart.’ THE NEW YORK TIMES
‘Not many novels bring me to tears… it takes a special storyteller to tell the tale of such devastation. It seems so wrong to say I loved this book, but I did. I loved, I learned, I cried.’ Natasha Lester
'Reminds us that it is in the darkest gardens that the brightest seeds of hope are sown' Kristin Harmel, bestselling author of The Room on Rue Amelie
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Impossible choices faced by loving parents lie at the heart of this underwhelming tale by Correa (The German Girl). The story opens in New York City in 2015, when the elderly Elise Duval receives a phone call from a strange woman who had recently been in Cuba and found some letters that belong to Elise. The narrative then jumps back to Berlin, starting in 1933 and continuing through 1947 in France. After Julius Sternberg, a Jewish doctor, dies in a prison camp, his wife Amanda carries out his wishes that the rest of the family leave Germany. The plan is for their two daughters, four-year-old Lina and five-year-old Viera, to live in Cuba with an uncle. Unable to secure the necessary travel documents to accompany them, Amanda will go to an old friend, Claire Duval, in France until it's safe to bring the girls back. At the last minute, Amanda decides Lina is too young to go and sends Viera alone. Amanda and Lina's new life in Haute-Vienne with Claire and her daughter, Danielle, turns dangerous when WWII erupts and the Germans arrive in France. Lina and Danielle hide out in an abbey, but in 1944, the Germans come looking for weapons and one of their missing soldiers. While Correa convincingly evokes the perils of occupied France, his characters rarely move beyond being one-dimensional, and the hasty conclusion about how the war ended for Viera and Lina is unsatisfying. Readers interested in WWII fiction have plenty of better options elsewhere.
Customer Reviews
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This book is one of the best book I have EVER read !! And I definitely recommend it, I could read this book over and over and over again it’s got so much meaning to it and it’s just so interesting and sad on what people had to do for their loved one.