This book is about a daughter gradually discovering her mother's horrific wartime experiences and learning to understand her. Some of it is extremely harrowing but you'll feel such warmth for the characters that you'll come to care for them and want to find out more. This is a book that may appeal especially to women.
In the middle of that night, my mother said she woke up on the couch in a suffocating heat, the sheets clinging to her body, a damp second skin. She fought to take each breath, her throat and lungs burning, and worked her way toward the bedroom, where the waves of heat originated. 'I thought there was a fire in there, that you were burning to death,' my mother told me when I woke the next morning, my feet bandaged in strips of bedsheet.
