Showing results by author "Alison Layland - translator" in All Categories

For hyper-particular publishing heir Jonathan Grief, the day starts like any other - with a strict morning fitness regimen that’ll keep his divorced, easily irritated, cynical, forty-two-year-old self in absolutely flawless physical condition. But all it takes to put a crimp in his routine is one small annoyance. Someone has left a leather-bound day planner with the handwritten title Your Perfect Year in his spot on his mountain bike at his fitness course!

1914. For Paul, with love. Jewish silversmith Johann Blumenthal engraved those words on his most exquisite creation, a singing filigree bird inside a tiny ornamented box. He crafted this treasure for his young son before leaving to fight in a terrible war to honor his beloved country - a country that would soon turn against his own family. A half century later, Londoner Lilian Morrison inherits the box after the death of her parents. Though the silver is tarnished and dented, this much-loved treasure is also a link to an astonishing past.

Lilly Kaiser had come to terms with her solitary, uncomplicated life after becoming a young widow. So when a stranger delivers an old violin to her Berlin antiques shop and tells Lilly it belongs to her, she's completely bewildered. Why should she be the one to inherit such an exquisite instrument?

Lilian Morrison has one memento of her beloved sister, Emma: a battered silver music box. A family heirloom that was passed down through two world wars, the box was the key to Lilian’s recent, joyous reunion with the surviving members of her birth family, whom she lost many years earlier when she and her sister fled Hitler’s Germany on the Kindertransport. Now Lilian is compelled to investigate Emma’s final days after the girls were shipped to separate foster families in Britain and the time before Emma was killed in the London Blitz. 

When newly single Annabel Hansen moves to the coastal town of Binz, all she wants is to leave her former life behind. Soon after settling into a beautiful home overlooking the Baltic Sea, she stumbles upon an old fishing boat in a nearby harbor and discovers another purpose: to convert the bullet-riddled Storm Rose into a floating café. Yet there's more to this project than peeling paint and a bad engine.

Gertrud and her foster sister, Hanna, used to be inseparable. But as the years pass, Hanna becomes the beautiful one while Gertrud remains plain. Their once unbreakable bond is strained by jealousy - until Gertrud is brutally murdered and Hanna disappears without a trace.

When beautiful Julietta meets aloof, handsome photographer Bastian, she immediately feels butterflies in her stomach.

But Bastian has a secret: Since birth, he has suffered from a very rare skin disorder that makes him exceptionally prone to injury. His life is riddled with pain and rejection; his thoughts are dominated by self-doubt and mistrust.

Julie wants to help him shake loose his inhibitions and open up to her, but can she reach deep enough to truly understand his suffering?

Diana Wagenbach is the sole survivor in a withering family tree fraught with secrets. When the first in a trail of clues is handed down to Diana by her great-aunt on her deathbed, along with a plea to assuage their family's guilt by revealing all, Diana obliges. She follows the clues - a picture here, a letter there, a pressed frangipani flower in a book - that carry her away from her philandering husband in Berlin to a charming manor in England and all the way to a tea plantation in Sri Lanka.