An Act of Peace

The story of Klaus-Pierre Dessin, the illegitimate son of a young French woman and a high-ranking German soldier, who fall in love in Paris during the Nazi occupation in WWII. His father is killed in the German retreat and his mother is faced with bringing up her young son on her own. Told in the first person, KP starts in 1989 as the Berlin wall falls and recollects life from the time as a toddler he and his mother took refuge with an aunt in Provence after her Catholic family in Paris had disowned her. The suffering of taunts and bulleying from French children - 'the German brat, the German brat' and the eventual move to KP's German family near Lubeck on the West German side of the West-East German border. There on an estate recovering from war KP learns about life. He is clever, multi-lingual, goes to university in Heidelberg and also in England (Oxford) where he discovers that people are similar regardless of nationality. And he falls in love...


Genre: Romance