Juliet Conlin

Shortly before Christmas, 79-year-old Alfred Warner arrives at Berlin's busy central train station to meet his granddaughter Brynja for the first time. When she fails to arrive, Alfred, afraid and alone, is taken in by a stranger, Julia, who quickly realises that there is something remarkable about him. Worried sick, Alfred discovers that his granddaughter is lying in a coma in a Berlin hospital following an unexplained accident and may take months to fully recover. After the sympathetic Julia insists he stays at her home for Christmas, Alfred becomes increasingly anxious and announces that his time is running out and that he has only six days left to live. He knows this because the voices he has been listening to for his entire life have told him so. Alfred insists he must tell Julia his life story in the hope of saving Brynja's life after he is gone. If Brynja does recover, she must finally learn the truth. And so, over the ensuing six days he pours out his extraordinary tale. It has been a most uncommon life, but the one constant during each stage of his journey are the voices which accompany him, voices which for other members of his family, including Brynja, have been far less benign. Now Alfred's final duty is to make sure that Julia understands, so that Brynja does not become yet another family tragedy.

The Uncommon Life of Alfred Warner in Six Days

"I wasn't sure I liked the sound of it. Even my vivid imagination could hardly fathom a place as tight, or dense, or narrow as Shanghai." It's April 1939 and, with their lives in Berlin and Vienna under threat, Esther and Kitty - two very different women - are forced to make the same brutal choice. Flee Europe, or face the ghetto, incarceration, death. Shanghai, they've heard, Shanghai is a haven - and so they secure passage to the other side of the world. What they find is a city of extremes - wealth, poverty, decadence and disease - and of deep political instability. Kitty has been lured there with promises of luxury, love, marriage - but when her Russian fiancé reveals his hand she's left to scratch a vulnerable living in Shanghai's nightclubs and dark corners. Meanwhile, Esther and her little girl take shelter in a house of widows until the protection of Aaron, Esther's hot-headed former lover, offers new hope of survival. Then the Japanese military enters the fray and violence mounts. As Kitty's dreams of escape are dashed, and Esther's relationship becomes tainted, the two women are thrown together in the city's most desperate times. Together they must fight for a future for the lives that will follow theirs. A sweeping story of survival, community and friendship in defiance of the worst threat to humanity the world has ever faced. From the author of the extraordinary The Uncommon Life of Alfred Warner in Six Days, The Lives Before Us will particularly resonate with readers of Jeremy Dronfield (The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz), Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See), Heather Morris (The Tattooist of Auschwitz), and Costa-winner Bart van Es (The Cut Out Girl). PRAISE FOR THE LIVES BEFORE US: 'Juliet Conlin vividly recreates the lost world of wartime Shanghai's Jewish ghetto - a place of hope and despair in equal measure; a city of temporary refuge, yet continuing daily struggle. I was absorbed.' - PAUL FRENCH, 'Shanghai's champion storyteller' and author of City of Devils 'The Lives Before Us opens up a captivating new world in a war I thought I knew about, a raucous Casablanca transposed to the East, filled with the intrigues of outcasts and determined survivors.' - ALEX CHRISTOFI, author of Glass 'Juliet Conlin brings wartime Shanghai to vividly to life with a wealth of fascinating detail.' - SARA SHERIDAN, author of The Ice Maiden 'Chronicles the courage and endurance of two women in wartime Shanghai, separated, then reunited, in a dangerous and desperate place. Strongly drawn characters quickly demand attention, and empathy, and their compelling story charts a little known aspect of the Second World War, and of a persecution felt far beyond Europe.' - SARAH MAINE, author of The House Between Tides

The Lives Before Us

London, 1920. Elliot Taverley is an ambitious young psychoanalyst specialising in the new and controversial field of handwriting analysis. When he receives a visit from a man who seems to change personality when he copies others handwriting, Elliot is intrigued and soon becomes obsessed with the man and his mysterious disorder. Spiralling into an increasingly bizarre cat-and-mouse chase and with with his mind collapsing, Elliot is forced to confront his difficult childhood and the horrors of war in Arctic Russia in a desperate search for the truth. The Fractured Man is one of the most explosive debuts of the year a psychological thriller that takes us through a war-ravaged Europe and the dark minds that inhabit it to a shocking conclusion.

The Fractured Man

Approaching 80, frail and alone, a remarkable man makes the journey from his sheltered home in England to Berlin to meet his granddaughter. He has six days left to live and must relate his life story before he dies... His life has been rich and full. He has witnessed firsthand the rise of the Nazis, experienced heartrending family tragedy, fought in the German army, been interred in a POW camp in Scotland and faced violent persecution in peacetime Britain. But he has also touched many lives, fallen deeply in love, raised a family and survived triumphantly at the limits of human endurance. He carries within him an astonishing family secret that he must share before he dies... a story that will mean someone else’s salvation. Welcome to the moving, heart-warming and uncommon life of Alfred Warner.

A heart-warming tale of one man’s extraordinary life and his long kept secrets

BERLIN 2019. A young writer is brutally attacked in her home and left for dead. For her sister Nina Bergmann, it's the beginning of a nightmare that will threaten to destroy her marriage, her job and – ultimately – her life. As she sets out to unravel the truth about what really happened to her sister, Nina comes face-to-face with inner demons she believed long since banished and discovers that her sister's past and that of the once-divided city are intertwined in unimaginable ways. The Wall may be gone, but its legacy still haunts Berlin . . .

Juliet Conlin

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