Peacefully: In Berlin

Anatomy of a postwar Anglo-German marriage--in a plain, unsentimental, documentary-like first novel by a British grandmother. In 1979, widow Cathy Baumann is on a European train headed for Berlin, planning to visit her late husband's German sister. . . and perhaps, it seems, to end her life with suicide there. Why this grim mission? Well, in vignette-flashbacks, as Cathy reluctantly talks to a fellow-passenger (himself a German married to an Englishwoman), Wendorf economically provides the marital history that has left Cathy with "the conviction of failure." an effectively somber, starkly detailed case-history of a problematic yet oddly courageous marriage.


Genre: General Fiction