Unqualified to practise English law, he set up the London branch of the family business, which dealt mainly in rabbit skins for hat-making. Once in England, at home and beyond, he and his family spoke only English and adopted all things British. In 1943 he was given permission to serve in the Home Guard; was elected onto the Executive Committee of the Export Group in London, working closely with the Board of Trade, an honour for a refugee from enemy Germany; and even made a wartime broadcast on BBC radio on the varied uses of rabbit skins. My father embraced English life absolutely and completely, grateful to the country that had given him shelter and enabled him to create a successful business and home for his family. From him, I learned to value liberty and freedom as the most precious of ideals, and to appreciate the paragon of democracy that was England.

During the remainder of the 1930s, other members of the Fein family left Germany and went to either London or New York, where another branch of the family business was established. Some left as late as 1938, following Kristallnacht, arrest, and a short time in Buchenwald Concentration Camp. One of my father’s uncles was so badly damaged by his three weeks of incarceration there that he died just a few years later. Other members of the family left it too late to leave and were eventually murdered at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.

My father, who was sixty-one when I was born and died when I was seventeen, never talked about his life in Germany, or the experience of living under Nazi rule. He refused to buy German goods and never spoke German. As a child, by some sort of osmosis, I assumed a sense that my father’s Jewish background should be kept a secret, fearing that if someone found out, we would be in danger. Occasionally, I would lie awake at night and imagine being taken away and put in a camp. I planned escape routes and how we could save one another. I never admitted to anyone my father’s Jewish roots until only a few years ago.

I cannot remember exactly when the idea of a novel inspired by my father’s past first came to me, but it fermented over a long period of time. I knew so little of his life in Leipzig that I felt instinctively it should be a work of fiction. Ideas mulled, characters came to me, and I began to read and research in earnest. The book, though inspired by what I learned about my father, is not about him. In writing this story, I hoped to show parallels between the early 1930s Germany in which he lived, and the Western world since the crash of 2008. Economic hardship of the 1920s led to the rise in nationalism and its extremist views and actions. New forms of mass media (radio and film) enabled the delivering of messages directly into homes and cinemas. All media, old and new, were used in highly effective propaganda across the nation. By these means, and by silencing voices of discontent, an entire population could be controlled and manipulated. Today, we potentially face a similar trajectory with rising nationalism, the fast-developing far right and far left sentiment, and extremism in many awful forms. Populist leaders stunning the world by winning elections. Brexit. Calls for closing borders and increasing racist sentiment. Anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head once more, including in once-centralist political parties. Ludicrous rumours of a Jewish conspiracy again circulating. People learning their news increasingly through the false bubbles of their social media networks.