A Portrait of Desire: A Novel

A British nurse working in a World War I hospital begins a love affair with one of the German prisoners in this passionate, tension-filled novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Dictionary of Lost Words, a Reese’s Book Club Pick.

France, 1915. An English nurse and German doctor fall in love. He is a prisoner of war; she has never cared for rules. Their love is visceral and urgent, forbidden and doomed, and it would have gone unrecorded if not for a series of drawings found by a curious art historian more than a century later in the Australian War Memorial.

At first the drawings seem insignificant, but the woman who finds them glimpses moments of intimacy and can’t look away. The images become part of a puzzle she needs to solve: who were the lovers, what became of them, and what story of war was the artist trying to tell? And why was this seemingly tragic pair so important to her that she recorded them so carefully, so hauntingly?

Spanning two time periods a hundred years apart, A Portrait of Desire is a dramatic and luminous tale of hope in the midst of darkness.