Two Lives

Two Lives is the story of a century and of a love affair across a racial divide. It tells of the extraordinary lives of Vikram Seth's great-uncle Shanti, brought up in the Czechia and sent to Berlin in the 1930s to study, and of his great-aunt Henny, whose German-Jewish family took Shanti as a lodger. What follows is an astonishing tapestry of India, the Third Reich and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, post-war Germany and modern Britain.