Red cloth

Laura Körösi is a happily married woman in her fifties with three children. Her life is free of excitement, but perhaps that is why she thinks she could not wish for anything more. Her husband is a successful architect, one of her three sons is at university, the other is about to get married, and the third is approaching her rebellious teenage years. Laura has nothing else to do but pave the way for her children and help her husband with his work. Very rarely, however, she is overcome by a nostalgic longing for a life she never lived. On such occasions, she goes to her grandmother's house and looks around among her great-grandmother's paintings in the attic. Laura spent her childhood in the threesome of her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother, balancing between the three women's silent, tense relationship, while having no idea what was causing the vortex beneath the surface. She was most attached to her great-grandmother, a bohemian woman who had been preparing to be an actress in her youth and who later found all her joy in painting. Many years passed before Laura fulfilled her former promise and organized an exhibition of her great-grandmother's paintings. However, she did not expect that each picture was a piece of her own past, each color a fragment of memory, and the narratives associated with the pictures would slowly unfold a story shrouded in silence for decades. Secrets, silence. What causes a greater psychological burden: the gentle silence or the spoken, sometimes cruel reality? Barbara Bauer's new novel follows the path of a deeply repressed trauma passed down through generations through the stories of four women, from the moment of tragedy to the day of recognition, from the endgame of World War II to the present day.