Ravic is a German doctor and refugee living in Paris in 1939. Despite a law banning him from performing surgery, he has been treating some of the city's most elite citizens for two years on the behalf of two less-than-skillful French physicians.
Forbidden to return to his own country and dodging the everyday dangers of jail and deportation, Ravic manages to hang on, all the while searching for the Nazi who tortured him back in Germany. And though he's given up on the possibility of love, life has a curious way of taking a turn for the romantic, even during the worst of times.
Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) was born in Osnabrück, Germany, of French ancestry. He studied at the University of Münster but had to enlist in the German army at the age of eighteen. He fought on the Western Front and was wounded several times. He began his writing career as a journalist. Fame came with his first novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), which sold more than a million copies in its first year and created a new literary genre of veterans writing about conflict. He left Germany in 1932 because of Nazism, came to the United States in 1939, and became a US citizen in 1947. All Quiet on the Western Front was adapted to film in 1930.
Geoffrey Howard (a.k.a. Ralph Cosham) (1936–2014) was a British journalist who changed careers to become a narrator and screen and stage actor. He performed in more than one hundred professional theatrical roles. His audiobook narrations were named “Audio Best of the Year” by Publishers Weekly, and he won seven AudioFile Earphones Awards, and in 2013 he won the coveted Audie Award for Best Mystery Narration for his reading of Louise Penny’s The Beautiful Mystery.