This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.
Germany, 1942 - Hitler's war takes a fatal turn, relying on a newly invented weapon - the Vergeltungswaffe V2 - the first ballistic rocket ever - to deliver the Endsieg.
Siegfried is sixteen, brilliant, and marked for a war that has already taken his father and both his brothers.
To save him, his mother makes a desperate bargain - and delivers her son into the secret heart of the Nazi rocket program, into the orbit of the visionary who will one day reach the moon, and whose rockets are already falling on cities - Wernher von Braun.
Then, in a candlelit Berlin apartment, Siegfried hears Rachel play the cello and understands, in a single breath, that he has found the one thing worth surviving for.
But Rachel is Jewish. Within weeks she is gone - deported into a concentration camp East. Into the same machinery Siegried is working for. They meet again in a tunnel beneath a mountain where the rockets are assembled by prisoners worked to death in their thousands. He will do anything to keep her alive. It may not be enough.
Some loves are forbidden. This love is impossible - divided by the machinery of a genocide, by history itself. As the Third Reich collapses, barbed wire and an iron curtain falls across Europe, they are driven toward the same unbearable question: whether a love this rare can survive a century this cruel.
A multi-layered, devastating, deeply emotional novel of first love and final courage - two teenagers reaching, through the exact machinery built to destroy them, for a place too high for the deadly forces.
For readers of The Nightingale, All the Light We Cannot See, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Schindler's List with the restraint of Cold Mountain.
