With the story of her own mother, Barbara Honigmann tells the incredible life of an extraordinary woman in the Europe of wars and dictatorships in a sober, poetic, and moving manner. "A chapter from my life," her mother Lizzy called, with marked understatement, the most delicate chapter of this unusual life: her marriage to the world-famous "master spy" Kim Philby, who worked as a Soviet agent in England and later fled to the Soviet Union.