Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, 1929-39

Strikingly original, utterly absorbing’ Julia Boyd, author of Travellers in the Third Reich

1930s Europe – as the Roaring Twenties wind down and the world rumbles towards war, the great minds of the time have other concerns.

Jean-Paul Sartre waits anxiously in a Parisian café for his first date with no-show Simone de Beauvoir. Marlene Dietrich slips from her loveless marriage into the dive bars of Berlin. Father and son Thomas and Klaus Mann clash over each other’s homosexuality. And Vladimir Nabokov lovingly places a fresh-caught butterfly at the end of Verá’s bed. Little do they all know, the book burning will soon begin.

Love in a Time of Hate skilfully interweaves some of the greatest love stories of the 1930s with the darkening backdrop of fascism in Europe, in an irresistible journey into the past that brings history and its actors to vivid life.