The silent woman

A rapturous novel of love, longing and exile, The Silent Woman depicts a woman's life against a backdrop of war and political turmoil.

Sylva, half Czech and half German, is born into an aristocratic family and lives outside Prague.

She marries a man she doesn't love and is seduced by the joyful madness of Paris in the 1920s.

When the Nazis force her to state her loyalty, she yields, not realising how this decision will haunt the rest of her life.

Later in communist Prague, Sylva is destitute. When she learns a long lost love was sent to the Gulags, she goes searching for him.