Two Lives

A sweeping, absorbing novel that covers pre-war Vienna, 1940s Yorkshire, post-war New York, a retirement community in Florida and the London literary world, Two Lives is as gripping as it is beautifully written, a profound exploration of how we yearn to reconcile our pasts with our present.

An image appeared in her mind, a childhood memory she hadn't known it contained: a conductor leaning over her on a train late at night, speaking to her in a language she didn't speak, one of his eyes looking at her while the other stared, unblinking, straight through her. She felt her skin prickle everywhere at once.

Evelyn Lieberman has a busy social life and a close group of friends in her Florida retirement community. One of them recommends a novel by a famous British novelist, Simon Glaser, which she buys at the airport just a few weeks later. As she reads, she realises it is the story of her own childhood...

Born Evelyn Reiss in Vienna in 1932, she was sent away just before the outbreak of war and taken in by a single mother in Yorkshire, alongside a Czech boy named Simon. Glaser's novel is not fiction at all; he was the little boy she lived with in England, and Kindness tells the story of their time together, which ended when a prank they played on their foster mother went horribly wrong. But it also tells a story that she sometimes doesn't recognise, including the real reason for their traumatic and abrupt separation.

Her life turned upside down, Evelyn is compelled to travel to London to find Simon and ask him why he changed a crucial detail about their shared story. The two agree to search for the house in Yorkshire where they spent a year together, so long ago. While this journey will provide Evelyn and Simon answers to lifelong mysteries about that time, it will also reveal new surprises about how those events have reverberated in the lives of others.