Ellen Keith

The Dutch Wife Ellen Keith

In the bestselling tradition of The Nightingale and Lilac Girls comes a sweeping story of love and survival during World War II

Amsterdam, May, 1943. As the tulips bloom and the Nazis tighten their grip across the city, the last signs of Dutch resistance are being swept away. Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and deported to different concentration camps in Germany. Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labor camp or-for a chance at survival-to join the camp brothel.

On the other side of the barbed wire, SS officer Karl Muller arrives at the camp hoping to live up to his father's expectations of wartime glory. But faced with a brutal routine of overseeing executions and punishments, he longs for an escape. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, this meeting changes their lives forever.

From the Netherlands to Germany to Argentina, The Dutch Wife is a novel about the blurred lines between love and lust, abuse and resistance, and right and wrong. It is a harrowing and ultimately redemptive story about the capacity of ordinary people to persevere under extraordinary circumstances.