The amber nuggets (fossilized tree resin) found along the Baltic coast are said to be Januta’s tears. He tells her of the legendary Januta, Queen of the Baltic, who was punished by the god, Parkun, for her relationship with a fisherman.

Despite his poor German, he tells these stories to young Ilse by drawing pictures in the grain on the granary floor. Orphaned at twelve, Janusz roamed the country, living hand to mouth, his spirit sustained by the stories his mother told him. By 1940, Hitler has invaded Poland and Germany is at war, and Janusz, a large, strong Polish teenager, is one of four prisoners of war assigned to help Ilse’s father on the estate.

One of Ilse’s earliest memories dates from when she was four, and ran out of the house in early spring to see the sun and find her friend, Janusz. Segovia excels in depicting preschoolers’ worlds of sensation and emotion. As we know, the man is Hitler and the annexation of Austria was part of a pattern leading to World War II. Arno sleeps through the man’s speech about Austria welcoming the recent German invasion. On his third birthday, three year old Arno Schipper and his siblings are taken by their parents to the Konigsberg event, where he is fascinated by the tanks and other military vehicles and less so by the man in a convertible with his arm outstretched. As an adult she remembers that date as the day the geese chased her. When the novel opens on March 25, 1938, two year old Ilse Hahlbrock, an estate manager’s daughter, is unaware that the “master of her country’s fate” is coming to the nearest city, Konigsberg, for a parade and a major speech. Segovia likes to capture “the spirit of an era and a people”, focussing on those who “don’t feature in the history books.” In Tears of Amber, her two main characters are children who have no control over the political issues of their era, yet find themselves struggling to survive in wartime.

Tears of Amber is set in East Prussia between 19. In her author’s note in Tears of Amber, Mexican novelist Sofia Segovia says that she likes writing about lesser known historical events, and from “overlooked points of view.” Her first novel, The Murmur of Bees, is set in the early 20 th century against the background of the Mexican revolution and resulting agrarian reform.

Tears of Amber by Sofía Segovia