Freedom's Umbrella

Romania, 1948. A young typist falls in love with a doctor who promises her the world — and then loses her, in a single autumn night, to a man she never chose.

Maria is twenty years old and full of dreams when a powerful army officer named George decides she belongs to him. In a country tightening under communist rule, where a woman's reputation can be destroyed by a single rumor, Maria has no choice but to marry the man who took her. What follows is a forty-five-year marriage forged in silence, exile, betrayal, and — against all odds — a kind of love neither of them was prepared for.

From the desolate fishing villages of the Danube Delta, where George commands a remote prison and Maria builds a quiet life among the women of the village, to the seafront apartments of Constanța, where the past walks back through her door in the form of the doctor she once loved — Freedom's Umbrella follows three generations of a Romanian family through the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century.

When Maria's daughter Liliana, now grown, falls in love with a man whose family has dangerous connections to the West, the choices Maria has spent her life avoiding finally come due. And when an old letter arrives from a man George has known about all along, the silence between husband and wife is broken by a confession that will change everything.

A sweeping family saga of love, sacrifice, and the quiet courage of choosing one another, again and again, under a single umbrella against the rain of history.

Inspired by the true story of the author's grandparents.

Perfect for readers of The Nightingale, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and A Gentleman in Moscow.