In search of the key to unlock a great family mystery, Lemon Leopold, a Hollywood starlet, and her cousin Eliza, a romance writer, go to Berlin. Soon they are on a trail that leads back to their great-grandfather, Jozef Apfel, a Jewish pioneer of psychoanalysis in early twentieth-century Germany.

Alternating between the great doctor's household, the mysterious case of his patient Elsa Z., the rise of Nazi Germany, 1960s and 1970s Detroit, and modern-day Berlin, this is a story about a girl whose dreams reveal the future, a family beset by ghosts, and the place that haunts them all. A bittersweet confection, this novel combines all the ingredients of great storytelling into a family saga redolent of the Old World, layered with consequence and frosted with Technicolor.

So come along as we delve into the doings of Elsa Z. and discover what befell the Apfels in Berlin. Along the way, we'll visit lemurs and explore our longings, indulge in Black Forest cake and blue stationery. We'll go to the movies, sip our drinks by the pool, take a train ride, interpret our dreams, tell jokes, and forget about the time. And when we return, nothing will be the same.

Norah Labiner is the author of two highly acclaimed novels: Miniatures, an American Library Association Notable Book, and Our Sometime Sister, a finalist for the Barnes &Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. She lives in Minneapolis.

Norah Labiner's masterful follow-up to her groundbreaking "Our Sometime Sister "is an engrossing and innovative work conceived in classical style, popping with pop cultural panache, and exhibiting all the gifts and vision of its author, who was lauded by the "Utne Reader "as one of the "ten novelists who are changing the way we see the world.""Miniatures "is an intensely evocative novel with haunting characters and beautiful, painterly prose that summon the ghosts of Mary Shelley, Marcel Proust, and the BrontA sisters.

Young, impetuous, and possessing a passionate, vulnerable intellect, American Fern Jacobi is traveling in Ireland when she finds work as a live-in housekeeper to famous and reclusive writers Owen and Brigid Lieb.

The eccentric and world-weary Owen has lived in the shadow of scandal and suspicion ever since his first wife, a beloved and iconic novelist, committed suicide in the grand, drafty house where Fern has come to work. Amidst the Liebs's riddled and deceitful world, Fern forges an alliance with Brigid, Owen's young and beautiful second wife. When the two share the discovery of a controversial bundle of hidden letters, Fern not only unearths answers to the first wife's suicide, but also to her own past.

Norah Labiner's first novel, "Our Sometime Sister," was a finalist for Barnes &Noble's Discover Great New Writers Award. She has received an NEA fellowship and her fiction has appeared in "The Gettysburg Review, Columbia Review," and "Passages North." She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.