Christine

Christine is an epistolary novel that opens with a wound. The reader knows from the start that the girl writing these letters is already dead, that her mother is gathering the last communications from a daughter who will never come home. Christine Cholmondeley, young and English, has traveled to Berlin to study music, and from May to August 1914 she writes to her mother with a freshness that aches: excitement about her lessons, loneliness in a foreign city, disdain for the Germans who undervalue her, longing for home. Then the political temperature rises. War approaches. Christine flees towards neutral Switzerland, but pneumonia strikes in Stuttgart, and she dies before she can reach her mother. Written during the war but set in that last innocent summer, the novel carries a terrible weight of knowing. What makes it endure is not history but intimacy: a mother-daughter relationship revealed entirely through letters, and the way one young woman's voice, bright and vulnerable, becomes a memorial.