Summer at Gaglow

Esther Freud

From Shelf: The 1998 Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist

Summer, 1914. It is Emanuel's twenty-first birthday, and eleven-year-old Eva and her sisters are helping transform Gaglow for a glorious party. But their brother's arrival is overshadowed by the talk of war that comes with him from Hamburg, and when he is wrenched from the family to serve his country, Eva knows that nothing will be the same again.

Summer, 1914. It is Emanuel's twenty-first birthday, and eleven-year-old Eva and her sisters are helping transform Gaglow for a glorious party. But their brother's arrival is overshadowed by the talk of war that comes with him from Hamburg, and when he is wrenched from the family to serve his country, Eva knows that nothing will be the same again. Seventy-five years later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sarah's father begins to tell her about Gaglow, the grand East German country estate that will now come back to them. Alternating between Sarah's bohemian life in London and her grandmother's childhood during the First World War, "Summer at Gaglow" unites four generations of an extraordinary family in a tale of loss and love.

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