This is her first book, and very different from The Colony (no.1019).
Set in 1940’s Germany, the central figures are a soldier on the Russian front, who has married via an epistolary romance (did this happen?), a Berlin girl slightly higher up the call ladder than he is.
They meet on leave and she quickly becomes pregnant. On his return to the front line, they correspond, but the fortunes of war pull them apart. The German troops are (with hindsight naively) optimistic about their superiority over the Russians.
The same optimism prevails in Berlin, but Katharina is skeptical. As conditions in Berlin deteriorate, their son dies, and on the Eastern front Peter is imprisoned by the Russians for (I think) several years. Assuming he is dead, Katharina is pressured into meaningless sex with a Nazi official.
Before long the Russians arrive in Berlin and Katharina is brutally raped by five soldiers with the connivance of her family who assumes this is inevitable, as she is the only young woman in the house. This results in another baby. When Peter is finally released, he returns to Berlin, assumes the child is his, and when she disabuses him, he leaves, possibly for Ireland, like Heinrich Boll.
Good, but hard work, particularly the long central section which takes place almost entirely on the Russian front.
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