The long-awaited new work from the best-selling author of The Invisible Bridge takes us back to occupied Europe in this gripping historical novel based on the true story of Varian Fry's extraordinary attempt to save the work, and the lives, of Jewish artists fleeing the Holocaust.

But those challenges serve only to accent Fry’s story; they push his personal plot forward, but never meaningfully inform it. Fry also helps a separate set of refugees escape Marseille via ship for Martinique, a French colony that also permits travel to the United States. For this parallel storyline, Orringer invents a significant backstory and narrative momentum: a relationship history dating back some 12 years to the couple’s time as Harvard undergraduates; Grant’s re-appearance in Fry’s life, in France in September 1940, to seek assistance for his current German-Jewish lover and the lover’s twenty-something son (who are also fictional creations); an identity for “Elliott Schiffman Grant” that includes not just homosexuality but also parentage that is both Jewish and African-American (as complicated as this intersectional identity may be today, consider how it raises the stakes for a story set in 1940); and a renewed passion that obsesses Fry for the remainder of his time in France, both in the tactile narrative present and in his ruminations about a possible future.Sometimes they would send potential clients down to [Marseille’s] Vieux Port and ask them to make a few sketches. He ran a rescue network in France helping Jewish refugees - and anti Nazi’s -escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. It’s a scenario that forces both characters and readers toward pat musings about the impossibility of making the right choice in war, or the fallibility of the human conscience, or the true value of a life, or, well, you get the picture. The simplified picture of France at this time would include patriotic French citizens gathering in secret to support the resistance, French troops eagerly awaiting their chance to fight back against the Axis powers and French cities awaiting Allied rescuers to free them.

Coming in at almost 600 pages, this book seems like it would be full of content related to the Holocaust, the artists involved, the methods of smuggling them out of France. Fry went to Marseille as a volunteer for the Emergency Rescue Committee, which initially received support from Eleanor Roosevelt. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. There was, it turned out, no train to the village where the Chagalls lived: one of many complications he'd failed to anticipate.

Not only is this chapter in history covered in textbooks and classrooms, it is also frequently the subject of movies and novels. In a March 2023 interview with Deadline Hollywood ahead of Transatlantic's Séries Mania screening, Winger said she took inspiration from the film Casablanca (1942).