1939: In a hotel room overlooking Piccadilly Circus, two young men are arrested. Charles is court-martialled for ‘conduct unbecoming’; Anselm is deported home to Germany for ‘re-education’ in a brutal labour camp. Separated by the outbreak of war, and a social order that rejects their love, they must each make a difficult choice, and then live with the consequences.

2012: Edward, a diplomat held hostage for eleven years in an Afghan cave, returns to London to find his wife is dead, and in her place is an unnerving double – his daughter, now grown up. Numb with grief, he attempts to re-build his life and answer the questions that are troubling him. Was his wife’s death an accident? Who paid his ransom? And how was his release linked to Charles, his father?

As dark and nuanced as it is powerful and moving, The Road Between Us is a novel about survival, redemption and forbidden love. Its moral complexities will haunt the reader for days after the final page has been turned.

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Nigel Farndale was born and raised in the Yorkshire Dales where he farmed with his father and grandfather, a veteran of the Trenches. He is the author of Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce, shortlisted for the Whitbread Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and of The Blasphemer, shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Novel Award and selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club. He now lives on the Hampshire-Sussex border with his wife and their three children.