In 2013 Thomas Harding published an award-winning double biography, Hanns and Rudolf. It was about his great-uncle Hanns Alexander, the son of a prosperous German family who fled Berlin for London in the 1930s, and Rudolf Höss, a farmer and soldier who became the Kommandant of Auschwitz, and how their two very different lives intersected.

In The House by the Lake, Harding has again mined his family’s experience, this time exploring the reasons why his Alexander great-grandparents fled Germany and the story of the summer house in Groß Glienicke, a village near Berlin, which they were forced to abandon. In doing so, he has produced an equally original and highly personal take on this corner of history.