They Went Left

By Monica Hesse

In post-war chaos, a girl searches for her lost brother, uncovering secrets that could heal or destroy her.

4.2/5 Goodreads · 20,484 ratings

400 pages· 84,331 words· Est. 8 hour read

$12.99Save 4%

In stock. Also at Amazon or Bookshop.

Bookroo's summary

In 1945 Germany, Zofia Lederman, an eighteen-year-old Holocaust survivor, embarks on a desperate quest to find her missing brother, Abek. Haunted by a promise and surrounded by others seeking lost loved ones, Zofia navigates a world of secrets and shattered lives. As she delves deeper into the mystery, she encounters Miriam, searching for her twin, and Josef, a man cloaked in enigma. Each step brings her closer to the truth but also to the brink of despair. Can Zofia fulfill her vow in a landscape of loss, or will the answers she seeks break her completely?

From the publisher

In the rubble of a broken continent, a girl must solve a mystery whose answers could rebuild her family–or break her completely, in this New York Times bestselling, critically acclaimed tour de force historical novel from Monica Hesse, author of Girl in the Blue Coat. Germany, 1945. The soldiers who liberated the Gross-Rosen concentration camp say the war is over, but nothing feels over to eighteen-year-old Zofia Lederman. Her body has barely begun to heal, her mind feels broken. And her life is completely shattered: Three years ago, she and her younger brother, Abek, were the only members of their family to be sent to the right, away from the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Everyone else–her parents, her grandmother, radiant Aunt Maja–they went left. Zofia’s last words to her brother were a promise: Abek to Zofia, A to Z. When I find you again, we will fill our alphabet. Now her journey to fulfill that vow takes her through Poland and Germany, into a displaced persons camp where everyone she meets is trying to piece together a future from a painful past: Miriam, desperately searching for the twin she was separated from after they survived medical experimentation. Breine, a former heiress, who now longs only for a simple wedding with her new fiancé. And Josef, who guards his past behind a wall of secrets, and is beautiful and strange and magnetic all at once. But the deeper Zofia digs, the more impossible her search seems. How can she find one boy in a sea of the missing?