A World Elsewhere An American Woman in Wartime Germany [Paperback]

The extraordinary love story of an American blueblood and a German aristocrat—and a riveting tale of survival in wartime Germany

Sigrid MacRae’s family story,A World Elsewhere, reads like an enthralling novel—one that would have remained unwritten had her mother, Aimée, not given her daughter the letters and journals she car­ried out of Germany during World War II.

While visiting Paris in 1927, Aimée, a wealthy American debutante, falls in love with Heinrich, a charming yet penniless Baltic German aristocrat. They marry, but life in 1930s Germany is bleak. Two years into the war, Heinrich volunteers for the Russian front. Left to fend for herself, and living in a country at war with her homeland, Aimée gathers her six young chil­dren and flees the advancing Russian army on an epic journey back to the country she thought she left behind.“A World Elsewhereis a literary masterpiece, fully realized, and a perfect work of art, a daughter’s eloquent monument to her courageous mother. It is also a reminder that war spares no one but wounds everyone it touches.”—Edmund White, author ofInside a Pearl

“This is family history as story, carefully researched, beautifully written, and impossible to put down.”—Blaine Harden,New York Timesbestselling author ofEscape from Camp 14

“A World Elsewhereis extraordinarily brave and intensely disturbing....MacRae had access to a cache of letters than any family historian would kill for, and she does a superlative job of combining the most intimate familial details with the sweep of big, convulsive history.”—David Laskin, author ofThe Family

“Only a person of superb literary gifts and exquisite sensibility could have done justice to this great story. The excitements and horrors of wartime are brought vividly to life, and the reader remains lcÄ