Welcome to Litsy!

Terrifying secrets, torn loyalties, love versus duty, the gripping story of a young actress caught up in highly dangerous events in 1930s Berlin... Berlin, 1933. Warning bells ring across Europe as Hitler comes to power. Clara Vine, an attractive young Anglo-German actress, arrives in Berlin to find work at the famous Ufa studios. Through a chance meeting, she is unwillingly drawn into a circle of Nazi wives, among them Magda Goebbels, Anneliese von Ribbentrop and Goering's girlfriend Emmy Sonnemann. As part of his plan to create a new pure German race, Hitler wants to make sweeping changes to the lives of women, starting with the formation of a Reich Fashion Bureau, instructing women on what to wear and how to behave. Clara is invited to model the dowdy, unflattering clothes. Then she meets Leo Quinn who is working for British intelligence and who sees in Clara the perfect recruit to spy on her new elite friends, using her acting skills to win their confidence. But when Magda Goebbels reveals to Clara a dramatic secret and entrusts her with an extraordinary mission, Clara feels threatened, compromised, desperately caught between her duty towards - and growing affection for - Leo, and the impossibly dangerous task Magda has forced upon her. Kate Saunders praises Patrimony: 'Two beguiling love stories, past and present, brilliantly entwined. I was mesmerised' And Kate Figes on The Shell House: 'One of those novels you just want to curl up with on a cold afternoon... this is an intelligent woman's love story'