A week after her mother's funeral, Mali Feuer enters the Manhattan apartment she dreads emptying-and finds a manila envelope filled with unsent letters.
Written in her mother Eva's unmistakable hand, the pages open a door Mali has spent a lifetime trying not to walk through.
As she reads, Eva's buried past unfolds: a Jewish childhood in 1930s Berlin, the terror of Nazi persecution, wartime London, exile, survival, and the losses that never stopped echoing. But the letters reveal more than history. They force Mali to confront the deepest wound of her own life: her mother's absence, the childhood abandonment she has never fully forgiven, and the silence that shaped generations of women in her family.
Moving between Berlin, London, and New York, Circumference of Silence is a haunting, emotionally rich novel about memory, inheritance, motherhood, trauma, and what it takes to face the truths a family leaves unspoken. The manuscript frames the story through Eva's posthumous letters, Stella's fate in Nazi Germany, and Mali's struggle to reconcile history with her own fractured bond with her mother.
For readers of historical book-club fiction, multigenerational family stories, and emotionally layered novels about the Holocaust and its aftermath.