Theo & Flora

When novelist Charlie Wasserman’s wife Sascha divorces him, he finds a box of letters among the belongings his investment-banker wife did not care to remove when she signed over their house and asked never to be contacted by him again. Written between 1940 and 1944, the letters expose a love affair between Sascha’s grandfather, Theo, a forty-something lawyer, and Flora, a much younger journalist. The letters spark an idea for a novel, even though Sascha had, via her lawyers, asked Charlie to destroy them. All the while the story of Theo and Flora’s lives unfurls, always against the backdrop of the 1940s and what it meant for Jewish people across the world. Theo & Flora is a delight to read: skilfully constructed, fluidly written, witty and entertaining, with, at the same time, a poignant undertow of sorrow and loss. The writer has a keen eye for detail and a droll way with language, creating a novel that is often laugh-out-loud funny, yet the humour is rooted in a humane, compassionate conception of character that deepens and complicates it.