Sparsely written, yet touching to the core. This is a novel about a displaced mother, who disappears in the fog when her son and daughter are still at a young age. Anna and Peter speculate about their mother’s mysterious disappearance and her origins – could she be a spy, secretly working for the Russians?

The novel is set in both the early to mid 1960s, when the mom disappears and in the post cold war era, when Anna, now a married mom herself, travels to Berlin and Kaliningrad (Konigsberg) to see what she can reconstruct of her deceased mom’s life. The very fact that their dad did not take them to the funeral and graveside (until much later) provides ground for wild speculation – the kids know that their mom originally came from Germany, their parents met in 1947 in Berlin, and they grow up at a time when The Cambridge spy network hits the news big time. Could their mom be a sleeper spy, found out and erased from their lives? Did their mom flee and go back to Russia? Why does Anna have to go to a piano teacher, Sarah Cahn, who must be a Jewish German immigrant herself, and possibly another spy colluding with their dad (and missing mom)? Sarah Cahn has a mysterious Hungarian visitor, who gets stuck, snowed-in for months during the tough winter of 1963 – Is he yet another spy? When the kids go to Oxford for a shopping trip, they think they recognize their mom’s coat – worn by a woman they cannot distinguish very well, who links up with the Hungarian man. Especially Peter gets estranged from his home, because of the mysteries surrounding his missing mom – he escapes from boarding school at some stage, getting caught in Hook of Holland, on the run.

Much later, when her dad has died and Peter has moved abroad (in Hong Kong?), Anna finally gets to go on her own travel to Berlin and Kaliningrad, trying to discover traces of her mother’s life, piecing together tidbits of recollections, stories, and some trinkets she left behind. By coincidence she meets a nice elderly German couple in Kaliningrad that proves helpful, taking her to the local archives, to localize her mother’s place in old, but gone, Konigsberg. And then suddenly all falls in place – a life-long jigsaw is solved – her mom had a cat like trinket with a very German name, and that name proves to belong to an old woman (grandma?) living on the 5th floor of a building described by Anna’s mom. The old woman’s son lived below stairs and was a highly ranked SS officer. And then the secretive behaviour of Anna’s mother starts to make sense.

Not the first book I read by Georgina Harding, which explores a bit of niche with her novels on war, memory, trauma and the intergenerational experience of such. My previous read of hers was the Painter of Silence, which I considered impressive. ( )

This book was quite slow moving, and it felt too vague and flimsy overall for me to fully enjoy it. The story follows a girl named Anna, whose mom supposedly dies in a car crash in 1962, when Anna is eight. On the news, there are all sorts of reports about spies, and Anna's brother begins to suspect that their mom did not die after all but instead was a spy and moved on to reinvent herself somewhere else. ( )

Promises to be a great story. At the same time as the capture of a sleeper spy ring in the UK in the 1960s, a german born mother who disappears leaving her children believing she was a spy too.

The story moves to the present day with her now 50 year old daughter travelling Eastern Europe to pick up clues to her mothers previous life.

Although I loved the prose style in this but found the ending rather flat and disappointing. ( )

I seldom have read a book which gave me goose bumps, but that one definitely did. It wasn't because of violence on the contrary it is such a lot of love, the deep missing of Anna and Peter's mother and the search for her roots that made me quivering. After their mother's death the children have got the feeling that her mother must have been a spy. Therefore they started their own spy game with the intention to find their mother because both of them were believed devoutly that her mother is still alive. Her mother hadn't told them much about her past and also their father wasn't about to tell them more. In the beginning Anna and Peter were very close but with the times they drifted apart. It was Anna who went to the East to search for her mother's roots.
It's a mystery within a mystery and thoughtfully written. ( )

Anna en Peter Wyatt groeien op in de Engelse Cotswolds. De Tweede Wereldoorlog is voorbij maar de Koude Oorlog woedt in alle hevigheid. Op een mistige ochtend in 1961 vertrekt de moeder van Anna en Peter van huis. Een vluchtige kus op Anna's wang is het laatste en ze verdwijnt in de mist om nooit meer terug te keren. De kinderen wordt verteld dat hun moeder is omgekomen bij een auto-ongeluk maar in plaats van naar een begrafenis te gaan, gaan zij met hun vader op vakantie. Karoline en Alec, de ouders van Anna en Peter hebben elkaar in 1947 in Berlijn ontmoet waar Alec als een speciaal ambtenaar voor het leger werkte en Karoline , een Duitse vluchtelinge op zoek was naar werk.

In de tijd dat Karoline verdween werd in Engeland een aantal mensen gearresteerd die verdacht werden van spionage. Omdat voor de twee kinderen rondom de dood van hun moeder de nodige geheimzinnigheid hangt beginnen zij te vermoeden dat er meer aan de hand is. In hun kinderlijke fantasie (en die wordt bij Peter vooral gevoed door spannende verhalen en theorieën over spionnen) proberen zij te reconstrueren wie hun moeder was en wat er uiteindelijk met haar gebeurd is. Veel later wanneer Anna volwassen is en Peter in Hong Kong woont, overlijdt hun vader. Anna vindt aanwijzingen over Karoline's leven en besluit naar Berlijn en Kaliningrad te reizen met de bedoeling het raadsel rondom haar moeder te ontrafelen.

Georgina Harding heeft een elegante manier van schrijven. Zij schildert met woorden prachtige plaatjes. In schitterend proza en mooie volzinnen construeert zij een boeiend, ontroerend en soms beklemmende verhaal. De personages worden goed uitgewerkt en zijn geloofwaardig. De atmosfeer van het boek ademt de sfeer van de zestiger jaren en het geeft een overtuigend beeld van de chaos die aan het einde van de Tweede Wereldoorlog en kort daarna het leven van miljoenen mensen beheerste.

Het boek geeft ook een mooi beeld over hoe gedachten en fantasieën zich in de hoofden van Anna en Peter konden ontwikkelen omdat niemand om verschillende redenen de moeite nam hen het echte verhaal over de verdwijning van hun moeder te vertellen. Over hoe een acht- en twaalfjarige de wereld om hen heen ervaren en er een eigen invulling aan geven.

Wie zij was is geen thriller of spionageverhaal maar een intrigerende roman over kinderen die zin aan hun leven proberen te geven door hun eigen werkelijkheid te creëren. Heel mooi, ontroerend en indringend geschreven en zeer de moeite van het lezen waard. ( )