The Colour of Water

Escaping Nazi-occupied France, a resistance hero and his Norwegian wife are forced to stop over in a foreign port. There the woman encounters an American, a man she fell in love with in Paris at a time when she believed her husband to be dead. At the end, she leaves her lover for a second time to fly to the free world. But these characters, and this story, are not the ones you think. In her second novel, Angela Green employs the classic love story of Casablanca to investigate what happens before and after that "happy" ending—an investigation which leads Anna Larssen, the book's central character, into exile on an island on the Northern rim of the world, to a place called, simply, "A." This is a book about the stories we are told and the scripts we write for ourselves to make sense of life. But as Anna's past replays itself around her, we discover that, outside the movies, real heroes are hard to find.