The Sunflower House

In Allegri’s stirring debut, a secretly Jewish woman works at a Nazi maternity home during WWII. In a frame narrative set in 2006, Katrine, the daughter of 86-year-old Allina, discovers a swastika-adorned box in her mother’s closet in New Jersey, and unexpectedly learns the truth of Allina’s past. As a girl in 1920s Germany, Allina was happily raised by her aunt Claudia and uncle Dieter in the tiny town of Badensburg. In 1939, shortly before his death from cancer, Dieter tells Allina her birth mother was Jewish. She keeps the news a secret, but still does not escape abuse from the Nazis. When they raze her village for reasons that come out later, she’s abducted and raped by a German soldier, who then forces her to work as a nurse at a Nazi Lebensborn home, or “baby factory,” where women give birth to Aryan babies. There, Allina falls for SS officer Karl von Strassberg, who’s covertly working for a resistance group. After their marriage and the birth of their daughter Katrine, Karl and Allina struggle to survive the war as he continues his dangerous resistance activities—leading them to make a fateful decision that Katrine eventually discovers. Allegri keenly depicts her characters’ moral calculations, and she convincingly portrays the horrors of the Lebensborn program. This will stay with readers. (Nov.)