My Friend, The Enemy: An English Boy in Nazi Germany

First edition, first impression.  xii, 212pp, with a central section of black and white plate illustrations.  Black cloth-covered boards, gilt lettering to spine.  8vo.  Volume is neat, clean, bright and tight throughout. Original dust wrapper, with a previous pricing label on the upper panel, not price clipped, very slightly bumped on extreme edges.  

On a visit to Germany in 1934, Norah Briscoe became enamoured with National Socialism, so much so that two years later she entrusted her six-year-old son Paul to a German foster family.  When war was declared in 1939, Paul was left stranded in an alien country, while his mother worked for the Ministry of Supply and attempted to smuggle information to the Nazis.  She was imprisoned for treason, but this is Paul’s story, of growing up an abandoned outsider in Nazi Germany and of his return to English in 1945 where he was confronted by a mother he did not recognise in a country whose language he could no longer speak. Enthralling and moving.