"In 1945, as the war in Germany nears its violent end, the Huber family is not yet free of its dangers or its insidious demands. Etta, a mother from a small, rural town, has two sons serving their home country: her elder, Max, on the Eastern front, and her younger, Georg, at a school for Hitler Youth. When Max returns from the front, Etta quickly realizes that something is not right. He is thin, almost ghostly, and behaving very strangely. Etta strives...

In the fall of 1938, as Germany rapidly changes under Hitler's regime, 17-year-old Christine Bolz, a domestic forbidden to return to the wealthy Jewish family she works for, and to her employer's son Isaac, confronts the Gestapo's wrath and the horrors of Dachau to survive and to be with the man she loves.

To provide for his children after being drafted into military service, surgeon Frank Kappus, a recent widower, marries a young woman who struggles to keep one of the children from being declared mentally unfit.

In 1939 Germany, Hanna Rombauer is sent to a "bride school" where she becomes increasingly disturbed by lessons of hatred, prejudice, and misogyny, and when she discovers a pregnant Jewish woman hiding near the school, she proposes a risky plan that would free them both.

"The lunacy of the final months of World War II, as experienced by a young German soldier. Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son -- the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel -- is curious about Walter's experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however, leaving nothing but the barest skeleton of a story...

As Hitler's Third Reich crumbles, an aristocratic Prussian woman and her child flee west away from the approaching Russian army. Eventually they form an unlikely alliance with a Jewish man escaping from the concentration camps.

"Alexsi Smirnoff -- a Russian orphan -- was trained as an agent by the Russian Secret Service and inserted into Nazi Germany, where he rose to a position in German intelligence services. As the war grinds on, trapped between two brutal dictatorships, Alexsi betrays both sides in a desperate ploy that succeeds...and fails. His false identities burned, his life at risk, Alexsi attempts to disappear in the hills - but is caught by the British. Recruited...

""A single spy--in the right place and at the right moment--may change the course of history." Alexsi Ivanovich Smirnov, an orphan and a thief, has been living by his wits and surviving below the ever-watchful eye of the Soviet system until his luck finally runs out. In 1936, at the age of 16, Alexsi is caught by the NKVD and transported to Moscow. There, in the notorious headquarters of the secret police, he is given a choice: be trained and inserted...

It is 1956 and Bernie Gunther has a new name (Christoph Ganz), a clean passport, a chip on his shoulder, and a menial low-paying job in Munich. And then an old friend arrives to repay a debt. He encourages Bernie to take a job as a claims adjuster in a major German insurance company. When Bernie tries to confront Siegfried Witzel, a brutish former Wehrmacht soldier who served in Greece during the war, he finds that somebody else has gotten to him...

"Germany, 1942. Franciscan friar Anton Starzmann is stripped of his place in the world when his school is seized by the Nazis. He relocates to a small German hamlet to wed Elisabeth Herter, a widow who seeks a marriage--in name only--to a man who can help raise her three children. Anton seeks something too--atonement for failing to protect his young students from the wrath of the Nazis. But neither he nor Elisabeth expects their lives to be shaken...