An Act of Peace: The enthralling sequel to An Act of Treachery - Hardcover

Widdecombe, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297829580 ISBN 13: 9780297829584

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005

Synopsis

The story of Klaus-Pierre Dessin, the illegitimate son of a young French woman and a high-ranking German soldier, who fall in love in Paris during the Nazi occupation in WWII. His father is killed in the German retreat and his mother is faced with bringing up her young son on her own.
Told in the first person, KP starts in 1989 as the Berlin wall falls and recollects life from the time as a toddler he and his mother took refuge with an aunt in Provence after her Catholic family in Paris had disowned her. The suffering of taunts and bulleying from French children - 'the German brat, the German brat' and the eventual move to KP's German family near Lubeck on the West German side of the West-East German border. There on an estate recovering from war KP learns about life. He is clever, multi-lingual, goes to university in Heidelberg and also in England (Oxford) where he discovers that people are similar regardless of nationality. And he falls in love....

About this title

About the Author

Tory MP for Maidstone. In John Major's Government she was Home Office Minister under Michael Howard. Shadow Home Secretary 1997-2001. Unmarried and a Roman Catholic convert. Has been writing since at school where she won essay prizes. Now writing third novel.

Find out more at www.annwiddecombe.com

From the Back Cover

THE CLEMATIS TREE

'You want to go on reading, you want to know what happens.' Ruth Rendell, The Sunday Times

'She has crafted a compelling story about the way a family copes with catastrophe.' Bel Mooney, The Times

'A delight, a very polished read.' Peter Stanford, Catholic Herald

'A well-constructed novel . . . It tackles the issues you'd expect, particularly euthanasia, but in a humane, thoughtful and undidactic manner, offering no easy answers.' Harpers and Queen

AN ACT OF TREACHERY

'A tale of illicit love, hate, and loss in Occupied France . . . confirming [Widdecombe] as an eloquent story-teller.' Glasgow Herald

'A gripping read.' Sunday Express

''Widdecombe is to be applauded for the range of her ambition within this book: the admirably large cast of characters is well handled; their dilemmas are believable and the narrative makes for compulsive reading.' The Times

From the Inside Flap

'A compelling story about the way a family copes with catastrophe',wrote Bel Mooney in The Times of Ann Widdecombe's fiction debut, The Clematis Tree

Here, in An Act of Peace, Ann Widdecombe again demonstrates why, as Ruth Rendell, in the Sunday Times, wrote of her earlier work,
'You want to go on reading, you want to know what happens.'

Klaus-Pierre is the love-child of a young Frenchwoman and a senior, married German officer serving with the forces occupying Paris. His father is killed before he is born and his mother is rejected by her family of patriots and resistance workers. Sent to live with a maiden aunt in Provence, Klaus-Pierre is surrounded by hostility until his father's family learns of his existence and takes him to Germany. Here he is loved and happy but, as he grows up in a Europe where old enemies are learning to cooperate, he tries to make his own Act of Peace with his French relatives. The result is a horrifying confrontation between the two families when they meet by accident in Provence. Meanwhile, Klaus-Pierre is involved in a further quest to comes to terms with his roots, as he tries to find out what kind of man his father really was.

The narrative of An Act of Peace moves across a 'peace-torn' Europe from Lubeck to Provence, from Heidelberg to Oxford, from London to Paris. Full of insights into individual character An Act of Peace follows on from Ann Widdecombe's second novel, An Act Of Treachery, but may be read as an enthralling stand-alone novel of how an individual overcomes national prejudice to experience a life of fulfillment.

Ann Widdecombe is best known as Member of Parliament and for her broadcasting and journalism, but had long had ambitions to write novels, which led to her writing of her first novel, The Clematis Tree. She was born in 1947 and grew up moving around the country and abroad with her parents, as her father served in the Admiralty. She was educated at the Universities of Birmingham and Oxford. She now lives in south London and in the picturesque village of Sutton Valence, Kent. She was a Home Office minister in John Major's
Government and Shadow Home Secretary under William Hague's leadership of the Tory party. She writes her novels on long train journeys and in Singapore when she visits her Chinese nanny.

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Author photograph:

Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Orion Publishing Group
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane
London, WC2H 9EA

Edition details

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0297829580
• ISBN 13: 9780297829584
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352