This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.
Germany, 1942. 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.
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 - swept east into the same machinery Siegfried helps to build, to a tunnel beneath a mountain where the rockets are assembled by prisoners worked to death in their thousands. He follows her into that mountain and will do anything to keep her alive. It may not be enough.
Some love is forbidden. This love is impossible - divided by a regime ruling a genocide, by history itself. They will steal seconds, not years. And as the Reich collapses and an iron wire divides Europe, they are driven toward the same unbearable question: whether a love this rare can survive a century this cruel and what it costs to hold a moral course when everyone else has stopped trying.
A luminous, devastating novel of impossible love and quiet courage - elevating the historic romance genre - two people reaching, through the exact machinery built to destroy them, for a place high enough that the forces of the ground no longer reach.
For readers of The Nightingale, All the Light We Cannot See, The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Schindler's List with the restraint of Cold Mountain
