The House of Dreams

In the summer of 1940, as France falls and the borders close, a quiet American journalist named Varian Fry rents a faded villa in the hills above Marseille. Within weeks the Villa Air-Bel becomes a refuge for the artists, writers and thinkers the Reich most wants silenced.

Decades later, the granddaughter of one of those who passed through the house returns to Marseille with a single photograph and the half-told story it carries.

Drawing on years of archival research, The House of Dreams is a novel about the small, stubborn rooms in which civilisation kept itself alive — and the people who, with very little, refused to look away.