Simon And The Oaks by Marianne Fredriksson

By the bestselling author of Hanna's Daughters, a powerful love story and a unique vision of humanity on the brink of a terrible war.

Simon is an ordinary boy growing up in rural Sweden.  Ordinary, that is, until the Second World War is declared; until he makes friends with Isak, a psychologically damaged Jewish boy who has fled with his father from Nazi Germany; and until he is told that he is adopted - that the working class couple he'd always assumed to be his parents are, in reality, distant relations.  His biological parents had met and, with no common language, loved each other in an enchanted spot under a waterfall nine years previously.

So begins Simon's quest for self-hood: a quest which takes him through the bitter privations of the Second World War, through his military service, and through a destructive relationship with Isak's cousin recently liberated from a concentration camp.  And always, in the background, his beloved stepmother watches over him, as constant as the oak trees on the cliff top that whispered their secrets to him when he was a child.

"A wondrous and winding story...The thrilling descriptions of countryside and nature are fascinating."  Berliner Morgenpost.

Hard cover, excellent condition, as good as new.  295 pages, all intact.