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Description of  A Bookshop in Berlin: The Rediscovered Memoir of One Woman's Harrowing Escape from the Nazis [Audiobook]

Winner of the JQ-Wingate Literary Prize "A beautiful and important book" (The Independent) in the tradition of rediscovered works like Suite Francaise and The Nazi Officer's Wife, the prize-winning memoir of a fearless Jewish bookseller on a harrowing fight for survival across Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1921, Francoise Frenkel - a Jewish woman from Poland - fulfills a dream. She opens La Maison du Livre, Berlin's first French bookshop, attracting artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets. The shop becomes a haven for intellectual exchange as Nazi ideology begins to poison the culturally rich city. In 1935, the scene continues to darken. First come the new bureaucratic hurdles, followed by frequent police visits and book confiscations. Francoise's dream finally shatters on Kristallnacht in November 1938, as hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses are destroyed. La Maison du Livre is miraculously spared, but fear of persecution eventually forces Francoise on a desperate, lonely flight to Paris. When the city is bombed, she seeks refuge across Southern France, witnessing countless horrors: children torn from their parents, mothers throwing themselves under buses. Secreted away from one safe house to the next, Francoise survives at the heroic hands of strangers risking their lives to protect her. Published quietly in 1945, then rediscovered nearly 60 years later in an attic, A Bookshop in Berlin is a remarkable story of survival and resilience, of human cruelty and human spirit. In the tradition of Suite Francaise and The Nazi Officer's Wife, this audiobook is the tale of a fearless woman whose lust for life and literature refuses to leave her, even in her darkest hours.