An act of treachery - Ann Widdecombe (First UK edition)

With her bestselling first novel, The Clematis Tree, Ann Widdecombe surprised and delighted an audience that had previously known her only as a Member of Parliament. Ruth Rendell, in the Sunday Times, wrote, ‘You want to go on reading, you want to know what happens.’

Following its success, Ann Widdecombe turns to a different period and a different milieu: the occupation of France in the Second World War, for a new and just as compelling novel. Catherine Dessin is fifteen and still at Convent School when the Germans enter Paris in 1940. Her parents are patriots and she is taught to hate the enemy, but two years later she falls in love with a senior and married German officer, defying the anger of her family and friends. The strains which this act of treachery places on those who love her and the tensions it creates as she turns from her Roman Catholic upbringing form the background of an unusual and doomed love.

Catherine grows up abruptly when Klaus, the German officer, returns from a spell in Germany having realised for the first time the full evil of the regime he is serving. Klaus now struggles with his own conflict of loyalties—between Catherine and his family and between his patriotic duty and his hatred of Nazism. Wary of those on whom they should rely, they become closer to each other. Rejected by her family, quietly ignored by friends, Catherine has to cope with the unforgiving aftermath of liberation. With insights into character that were widely recognised in her first novel, Ann Widdecombe twists and turns the plot to a surprising yet satisfying conclusion.