Rachel Johnson’s new novel, Winter Games was has just been released, and we’re lucky enough to have Rachel appearing at Lennoxlove on Saturday. Winter Games is a brilliant evocation of two generations – the 1930s and the 2000s – neither of which saw the end coming . . .
London, 2006. Magazine journalist Francie Fitzsimon has it all – the large flat, the husband, the gig to write up the holistic spas in Baja California – until she gets a call that turns her cushy child-free world upside down and pings her back to the devil's decade.
Munich, 1936. Eighteen-year-old Daphne Linden has a seat in the front row of history. While the National Socialists are strutting the pavements, Daphne and her blonde nymphet friend, Betsy Barton-Hill, are in Bavaria to learn German, to ski, to go to the Opera, to be 'finished'. The girls are having the time of their lives, partying with shiny-booted Stormtroopers, and falling in love. But something happened at the Winter Games that February, and Daphne still hasn't shared the secret of what happened with the person it affects most – her own granddaughter.
Winter Games transports you to the beer halls and Bavarian castles of the Third Reich, at a time when the English upper-classes thought that Hitler was probably a jolly good thing, by way of carefree pre-crunch London in 2006, when the living was loose, and the credit was even easier.
