Seven decades later in New York, on her twelfth birthday Anna Rosen receives a package from Hannah, the great-aunt she never met but who raised her deceased father. Anna and her mother immediately travel to Cuba to meet this elderly relative, and for the first time Hannah tells them the untold story of her voyage on the St Louis. At first the liner feels like luxury, but as they travel the circumstances of war change, and it soon becomes their prison. A young girl flees Nazi-occupied Germany with her family and best friend, only to discover that the overseas refuge they had been promised is an illusion in this engrossing and heartbreaking (Library Journal, starred review) debut novel, perfect for fans of The Nightingale, Lilac Girls, and The Tattooist of Auschwitz. The Rosenthals sell everything to fund visas and tickets. But now the streets of Berlin are draped in swastikas and Hannah is no longer welcome in the places she once considered home.Ī glimmer of hope appears in the shape of the St Louis, a transatlantic liner that promises Jews safe passage to Cuba. Based on a true story, this wonderful novel gives voice to the joys and sorrows of generations of exiles, forever seeking a place called home.īefore everything changed, Hannah Rosenthallived a charmed life.

The story begins in Berlin in 1939 where we meet Hannah Rosenthal. The German Girl sweeps from Berlin at the brink of WWII to Cuba on the cusp of revolution, to New York in the wake of September 11th, before reaching its deeply moving conclusion in the tumult of present-day Havana. The German Girl written by Armando Lucas Correa is a debut novel that revolves around the lives of two little girls Hannah and Anna over a period of 70 years.

The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa