A forbidden love. A forgotten artist. A wartime secret discovered many years later.

One sketch shows two hands. A man’s and a woman’s. They are back to back and almost touching…

France, 1915. War rages and enemy lines are clear, but in a hospital ward treating German prisoners of war Tilda, an English nurse, falls in love with Hugo, a German doctor. Their desire is visceral and urgent, forbidden and doomed, and it might have gone unrecorded if not for a series of sketches found more than a century later.

For the woman who finds them, these sketches are tantalising fragments of a lost narrative that she is determined to piece together...

This breathtaking novel from the author of international bestseller, The Dictionary of Lost Words, is about the complexity of desire in a time of war, but it is also about art and memory and the stories we choose to tell about the past.