Transgression

How can love survive a brutal time?In 1946 in North America, a child makes a grisly find in a deserted field-a discovery that opens a shuttered window on a secret dating back to the beginning of the turbulent decade.In 1941 in occupied France, Adele Georges's fruitless attempts to learn the whereabouts of her father, captured by the Nazis, lead her to a lonely young German soldier far from home. A spark between them becomes a fire-and a dangerous love affair blooms across enemy lines, dooming Adele to a grim postwar existence as a despised outcast, one of the infamous "horizontal collaborators." Ostracized, tortured, tormented, she chooses a desperate escape, accompanying a war-damaged yet optimistic Allied soldier across an ocean to a new land. But there is no refuge from the past, as Adele's broken heart and shameful secret drive her deeper into despair...and toward a shocking outcome.Part mystery and part love story-an unforgettable and beautifully written novel of secrets, passions, and consequences-Transgression is an exceptional work of power and strange beauty.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Romance, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.