Vivien Wilson
Paperback 2021
‘I could have shot Hitler that day.’ So begins the fictionalised memoir of the author’s mother. Born in Berlin in 1913, with a Jewish father, Ursula is a naïve but beautiful young art student and part-time fashion model. She finds herself feet away from Hitler when she is working as an interpreter for the 1936 Olympics. She flees the Nazis and eventually travels to England where she shares a room with a snake charmer whilst working for a circus. Armed with charm and a steely determination, she proposes to the first Englishman she meets. After a brief romance they are married but, in order to save her family, she forms a friendship with a prominent Jewish MP. Will her future be threatened by this relationship? And how does she come to end her days in Sydney’s Northern Beaches?
‘I was enthralled from start to finish.’ Professor Yasmine Gooneratne AO, author of Jane Austen and A Change of Skies.
‘A fascinating eye-witness account of those sinister days and the unstoppable descent into Nazism and war.’ Fiona Valpy, best selling author of The Dressmaker’s Gift.