Love and treasure

'A NOVEL TO LOVE AND TREASURE' PHILIPPA GREGORY'REMARKABLE' MICHAEL ONDAATJE'POIGNANTLY MOVING' JOYCE CAROL OATES Salzburg, 1946.

A fugitive train loaded with the plunder of a doomed people.

A dazzling, jewel-encrusted, peacock-shaped pendant. And three men - an American lieutenant who fought in WWII, an Israeli-born dealer of Nazi plunder, and a pioneering psychiatrist in fin-de-siecle Budapest - who find their carefully-wrought lives turned upside-down by three fierce women, each locked in a struggle against her own history and the history of their times.

Spanning continents and a century marked by war and revolution, Love and Treasure is by turns funny and tragic, thrilling and harrowing, mapping the darkness of a shattered Europe against the heartbreak of a modern New Yorker.

Told through the prism of the peacock pendant, the novel charts the ebb and flow of history, fate and fortune from 1914 Budapest to present-day New York. And at the centre of Love and Treasure, nested like a photograph hidden in a locket, a mystery: where does the worth of a people and its treasures truly lie?

What is the value of a gift, when giver and recipient have been lost - of a love offering when the beloved is no more?'AN AMBITIOUS, PERCEPTIVE NOVEL' GUARDIAN'A WONDERFULLY IMAGINATIVE WRITER' WASHINGTON POST