The Violin Maker’s Daughter: A Jewish fugitive. A German deserter. A flight through Nazi-occupied France. (The Alsace Chronicles)

Note to readers: This edition of The Violin Maker’s Daughter includes editorial revisions, including a change of the protagonist’s name, for historical reasons, from Sarah to Eva.

For readers of The Nightingale and We Were the Lucky Ones, a sweeping story of love, courage and sacrifice in wartime France.

A Jewish fugitive. A German deserter. On the run through Nazi-occupied France.

When the Nazis march into Colmar in 1940, Josef, a Jewish violin-maker, makes a fateful decision. Refusing to register his family as Jews, he, his wife and their five daughters hide in plain sight. They are not practicing Jews. No one suspects them. Until that night when everything changes.

A midnight raid shatters their fragile safety: the family has been betrayed. To survive, they must separate and flee Alsace. Seventeen-year-old Eva, her father's violin-making apprentice, reluctantly escapes first, with forged papers and a single chance to reach safety in southern France.

Along the way she meets Ralf, a young German soldier. When his commanding officer tries to assault Eva, Ralf makes a split-second decision that changes both their lives forever. Suddenly hunted as a deserter, he joins Eva on her desperate flight south.

But Eva makes one naïve mistake and Ralf is captured. Consumed by guilt, Eva joins the French Resistance and finally finds the strength and courage to fight against injustice. No longer hiding in fear, she embarks on a lonely and dangerous mission into Nazi Germany.

The Violin Maker’s Daughter is a companion novel to Soldier’s Girl, another gripping Alsace story centred around the matriarch Margaux and the Chateau Gauthier family. Now available!