Catrin Collier- One Last Summer.
This is meant to be a novel fiction about the Great-grandmother of the author who had to endure and flee Soviet ravaged east Prussia, although she was a German. It includes diary entries of those she encountered and family members who fought for Nazi Germany.
Not really sure I'm keen on the style or write -up of this author, but if she's trying to re-interpret her ancestral past, through author based character description, she's retelling loads of other lives as well. It doesn't bear a shade to me on Harry Patch, the actual biographical account, as he was a fighting tommy, and WW1 veteran.
I'm still trying to get to the end of this, and seeing as I know all the characters names and could see that she lived amongst the upper classes who had to bite down on their ration sizes to supplement the army, I am trying hard not to see the reality of the fact that a few ton of war savaged Russian POW'S had to really go without food, as they were being forced into fields to starve and labour without rations. Some stole cats to eat, because her great granny was forbidden to feed them, being in charge because her pa died. She did face down the threat of being arrested, by cajoling officers into making sure they got washed and deloused because of a possible typhus outbreak as well as feeding them so they could manage the estate.
The whole echoing back to the past thing, is because she was on her deathbed and wanted to see her beloved Allenstein, before she departed from this life.
The fact is the book goes on and on, back to the present, then to the past. She is saying farewell to all her family, and her granddaughter has to be her guide back to her roots.
Next few books I read, will be back on terra firma.. hopefully more emphatic than the last.