A sweeping story of love and survival during World War II

AMSTERDAM, MAY 1943. As the tulips bloom and the Nazis tighten their grip across the city, the last signs of Dutch resistance are being swept away. Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and deported to different concentration camps in Germany. Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labor camp or--for a chance at survival--to join the camp brothel.

On the other side of the barbed wire, SS officer Karl MYller arrives at the camp hoping to live up to his father's expectations of wartime glory. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, this meeting changes their lives forever.

Woven into the narrative across space and time is Luciano Wagner's ordeal in 1977 Buenos Aires, during the heat of the Argentine Dirty War. In his struggle to endure military captivity, he searches for ways to resist from a prison cell he may never leave.

From the Netherlands to Germany to Argentina, The Dutch Wife braids together the stories of three individuals who share a dark secret and are entangled in two of the most oppressive reigns of terror in modern history. This is a novel about the blurred lines between love and lust, abuse and resistance, and right and wrong, as well as the capacity for ordinary people to persevere and do the unthinkable in extraordinary circumstances.

Author: Ellen Keith
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Harlequin Sales Corp
Published: 09/04/2018
Pages: 352
Weight: 0.9lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.10w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780778369769
Original Edition


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/16/2018

About the Author
Keith, Ellen: - ELLEN KEITH is a Canadian writer and graduate of the University of British Columbia's MFA program in creative writing. Her work has appeared in publications such as The New Quarterly and the Globe and Mail, and she has received the Anton Fiction Prize and the James Patrick Folinsbee Memorial Scholarship in Creative Writing. She lives in Amsterdam. The Dutch Wife is her first novel.