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Winter Games
  • Published: 2 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241964385
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

Winter Games



Moving between 1930s Germany and pre-crunch London, Winter Games is a dazzling tale of secrets, betrayal, and two women, both caught up in the moment

Munich, 1936. She doesn't know it, but eighteen-year old Daphne Linden has a seat in the front row of history. Along with her best friend, Betsy Barton-Hill, and a whole bevy of other young English upper-class girls, Daphne is in Bavaria to improve her German, to go to the Opera, to be 'finished'. It may be the Third Reich, but another war is unthinkable, and the girls are having the time of their lives. Aren't they?

London, 2006. Seventy years later and Daphne's granddaughter, Francie Fitzsimon has all the boxes ticked: large flat, successful husband, cushy job writing up holistic spas . . . The hardest decision she has to make is where to go for brunch - until, that is, events conspire to send her on a quest to discover what really happened to her grandmother in Germany, all those years ago.

  • Published: 2 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241964385
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

About the author

Rachel Johnson

Rachel Johnson writes for (among others) the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and the Evening Standard. She is married with three children and lives in Notting Hill Gate.

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Praise for Winter Games

Johnson is excellent on period detail and captures the flavour of an era when the storm clouds were gathering

Mail on Sunday

The Jane Austen of W11

Scotsman

An edifying moral lesson as well as a tale of inter-generational sleuthing

Spectator

An excellent romp. Full of 'tally-ho' Mitfordian charm . . . a witty, fast read

Red

Excellent on period detail, the blundering innocent abroad and young heartbreak

Sunday Times

Johnson delivers a genuine sense of time and place . . . there isn't a dull sentence in this sure-footed novel

Jenny Colgan, Telegraph

There's never a dreary moment in this blast of a book . . . Johnson's descriptions are irresistibly exuberant . . . As addictively, fizzily invigorating as the Alpine air itself

Daily Mail

A rip-roaring read

Evening Standard