Ulli is a young woman squat­ting in a dis­mal, emp­ty Berlin apart­ment, one year after the war has end­ed. She’s scrap­ing togeth­er a liv­ing as an inter­preter between Amer­i­can GIs and the wide-eyed local girls eager to meet them. One night, Ulli meets two sol­diers who will change her life: Leo, hand­some and ambi­tious and des­per­ate to escape his small-town upbring­ing; and intel­lec­tu­al, asth­mat­ic Isaac, whose refugee par­ents had fled Rus­sia 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 con­tem­po­rary 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: a twist­ing nar­ra­tive that 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. 

Posts by Anne