'Fascinating...Broken post-war Germany is superbly drawn' The Times

For Ingrid Hoffmann the story of her sister's disappearance began in their first weeks in Southwest Africa...

Ingrid Hoffmann's childhood is transformed when her family moves to German Southwest Africa in 1902; she and her older sister, Margarete, are fascinated by the new world in which they find themselves. But the casual racism that pervades the German community, the strange relationship between her parents and Baron von Ketz and the tension with the local tribes all culminate in tragedy. Baron von Ketz is savagely murdered and his wife and their son, Emil, flee with the Hoffmanns.

Both families return to Berlin, shaken by their experiences but Margarete and Emil's engagement on the eve of the First World War helps to assuage Ingrid's anxiety about her sister's state of mind. But Margarete disappears on her wedding night at the von Ketz's country house. The mystery of what happened to her sister haunts Ingrid, and as Europe descends into chaos, her hope of discovering the truth becomes ever more distant.

After the war, in the midst of the revolution that wipes out the aristocracy that her family married into, Ingrid returns to the von Ketzes' crumbling estate determined to find out what really happened to her sister.

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