But what should have been a two day journey by train becomes a perilous, years long odyssey across Occupied France and deeper into the treacheries of war. Thus, with a purseful of worthless francs and a sack of provisions, the two flee north toward Solange s childhood home. Mistrusted by both the abbess and the convent girls, the unusually astute and curious Amandine finds her childhood filled with challenges and questions: Who is she? Where does she come from? Eventually, Solange is forced to choose between the terrors of the convent and those of a global war looming outside its doors. But even Solange s unconditional love cannot protect her charge. Solange takes it upon herself to give the child a distinctive name, Amandine, and the two form a special bond. In truth, however, she deposits the infant at a remote convent in the French countryside, leaving her with a great sum of money and in the care of a young governess named Solange. The child s grandmother, a countess, believes that she is protecting her daughter when she claims that the baby didn t survive. The story opens in Krakow in 1931, as a baby girl is conceived out of wedlock, the byproduct of a foolish heart and a tragic inheritance. Set against the backdrop of Europe as it moves inexorably toward World War II, Amandine follows a young orphan’s journey in search of her heritage.
Marlena de Blasi, the acclaimed author of such delectable memoirs as A Thousand Days in Venice and That Summer in Sicily, now brings her luminous prose to the world of fiction with this remarkable debut novel.
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