Grief

This novel explores the experience of grief, showing how emotions can collide, escalate, or heal when people in mourning are placed in a confined environment.

Firstly, the author places two lonely people in the same house to demonstrate how grief can bring people together. Rachel is grieving the loss of her son and her estrangement with her husband, and Stefan is mourning the death of his wife Claudia and the distance between him and his daughter. Rachel resents the Germans for the death of her son Michael during the war. Reading the booklet that teaches British families not to fraternize with Germans “stirred a primitive and reassuring emotion in Rachael. She could feel herself affirming its essential message: when all is said and done, Germans are bad. This idea had served the general purpose of getting them all through the war, bringing a consensus that stopped...