After living in America for many years, Kaethe Shalk returns to Berlin to try to come to terms with the Berlin of her youth. Kaethes journey from America to the broken ground of contemporary Germany becomes an act of recovery: of lives intertwined by politics and passion, of memory and the invented self, and of Kaethes search for a daughter lost to her, now grown and living in uncompromising isolation from her mothers past and present, somewhere in vast, resurgent Berlin.

Kai Maristed has studied and worked in Cambridge, Tokyo, Berlin, and Munich. She is the author of a short-story collection and three novels. She lives near Boston.

Johanna Ward (also known as Kate Reading) is an award-winning narrator and actor. She is a company member at Woolly Mammoth Theatre and has appeared on many other stages. She and her husband, actor-narrator Michael Kramer (Nick Bernard), live with their two children in the Washington, D.C. area.