"A nightmarish celebration of the American dream, of the transformative powers of ambition, talent and love...harsh and lyrical’

--Daily Telegraph

’A richly nuanced portrait of a woman who survives’

--Sunday Times

Beautiful Hazel Jones and her young son Zach are liked and admired by all they meet - but they inspire curiosity too. Why is Zach forbidden to mention his father, and how did Hazel get the scars on her forehead which she takes such pains to hide? Why do they roam from place to place, settling nowhere and confiding in no one?

Because Hazel Jones wasn’t always Hazel Jones. Once she was Rebecca Schwart, the dark-eyed daughter of German asylum seekers who fled to the US to escape the Nazis. Her father, hampered by language and chained by poverty, could only find work as a gravedigger, and Rebecca and her family lived in a hovel on the edge of the cemetery.

Driven mad by subjection to daily humiliation and destitution, Rebecca’s father committed a horrific crime which changed the course of her life forever. But can you ever re-invent yourself in the aftermath of murder - or is history destined to repeat itself?