An Act of Peace

by Ann Widdecombe (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2007

  $5.82

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $3.40

  Klaus-Pierre is the love-child of a young Frenchwoman and a senior, married German officer. Klaus-Pierre never knew his father, who was killed before he was born, and his mother was rejected by her family of patriots and resistance workers.

  Cared for by his German family, Klaus-Pierre is loved and happy - but as he grows up in a Europe where old enemies are learning to cooperate, he tries to make his own 'Act of Peace' with his French relatives. The result is a horrifying confrontation between the two families when they meet accidentally in Provence.

  Meanwhile, Klaus-Pierre is struggling with another quest to come to terms with his roots, as he tries to find out just what kind of man his father really was...

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.26

  The story of Klaus-Pierre Dessin, the illegitimate son of a young French woman and a high-ranking German soldier, who fall in love in Paris during the Nazi occupation in WWII. His father is killed in the German retreat and his mother is faced with bringing up her young son on her own.
  Told in the first person, KP starts in 1989 as the Berlin wall falls and recollects life from the time as a toddler he and his mother took refuge with an aunt in Provence after her Catholic family in Paris had disowned her. The suffering of taunts and bulleying from French children - 'the German brat, the German brat' and the eventual move to KP's German family near Lubeck on the West German side of the West-East German border. There on an estate recovering from war KP learns about life. He is clever, multi-lingual, goes to university in Heidelberg and also in England (Oxford) where he discovers that people are similar regardless of nationality. And he falls in love....