Ulli is a young woman, half English and half German, squatting in a dismal, empty Berlin apartment one year after the war has ended. She’s scraping together a living as an interpreter between Berlin-based GIs and the wide-eyed local girls eager to meet them. One night Ulli meets two American soldiers: Leo, handsome and ambitious and desperate to escape his small-town upbringing, and intellectual, asthmatic Isaac, whose refugee parents had fled Russia and then Paris for New York.
Winter Kept Us Warm follows Ulli, Leo, and Isaac through the next six decades of their lives—from Berlin to postwar Manhattan, 1960s Los Angeles, and Morocco. A marriage, two children, and yet only one parent—at the core of this novel is the mystery of how this came to be. Not a chronological narrative, it explores the dark corners and lantern slides of these characters’ lives, revealing in pieces and fragments what became of their long-ago love triangle set against the brutality of postwar living.
Winter Kept Us Warm is an evocative story of family, strained by the cruelty of war and its generational repercussions; a novel of the heart, filled to the brim with unforgettable characters stitching together the deep threads of love, friendship, loyalty, and of course, loss.
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“Raeff writes with vivid assurance about Berlin, America, and Morocco, about men and women, about love and work. As the boundaries between characters shift, as past and present converge, Winter Kept Us Warm casts a dazzling spell. A wonderful novel.”
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Margot Livesey, author of Mercury and Criminals