Between San Francisco and Belgian Congo, between war and silence . . .

It is 1936. Mimi lives in San Francisco, in a house she shares with her father and sister, writing letters to Maurice—a distant cousin she has never met. Maurice is in Belgian Congo, settling the estates of Europeans who die far from home. They have no shared memories, only paper, ink, and the weeks it takes a letter to arrive.

They write. For years. Three hundred and eighty-two letters survive.

Between us, an ocean, two continents, and the stubborn mathematics of distance. Marry me, Mimi. It’s all I want.

They become engaged and are set to meet in Belgium in May of 1940. Then the war comes. Maurice vanishes into the Resistance—imprisoned, interrogated, forced into an irrevocable choice. At home, Mimi endures years of silence and uncertainty, learning photography—Maurice’s great passion—to see the world through his eyes while waiting for letters that never arrive.

Drawn from their real correspondence, Mimi and Maurice is the story of a love written in full—and of what survives the silence.