A TELLER OF LOVE STORIES

A journey of five days spanning an entire century.

Escaping from her duties, husband and children for a few days, a woman journeys from Den Haag to Frankfurt via Amsterdam. The year is 1969, and she reflects on three romances set in times of war and defeat: her own, her parents’ and that of an ancestor during the Napoleonic wars. The latter is the story she wants to tell, but the narratives and lives seem increasingly to interweave. A king builds the modern state of the Netherlands; his illegitimate daughter is forced into a noble family from Mecklenburg; her great-grandson, a U-boat captain in the Imperial German navy, manages to trick the Socialist revolutionary sailors in Kiel, and tries to escape the darkness of his own soul, eventually becoming a preacher; his daughter, the traveller/narrator, who wanted to be a good German girl yet also oppose the Nazis, finds freedom in writing and whose ex-POW husband from a landowning family is slowly becoming estranged from her. Friedrich Christian Delius’s new novel builds on his own family’s moving story. It tells of a woman’s journey between Scheveningen, Heiligendamm and the German Rhine, a journey of five days that spans a whole century.