A gripping, deeply moving novel about one man’s search for truth and identity in the long shadow of war.

Heinz Fitz has only one tangible clue to his past: a worn piece of paper from the SS-Lebensborn program, a Nazi initiative designed to promote so-called racial purity. His mother, a Norwegian woman, fell in love with the wrong man—an Austrian soldier—during the German occupation. Betrayed and abandoned, she fled to Austria, only to be turned away by his family. Branded a collaborator in her homeland and a pariah in a foreign land, she was left to survive as best she could. Now, years later, her son is determined to piece together the fragments of his origins.

But every answer leads to more questions, and as he unearths painful truths, an alternative story—one of resilience, love, and survival—emerges from the darkness. Inspired by real events, Alois Hotschnig’s novel is both a fierce reckoning with history and a poignant tribute to a mother’s strength. A masterful meditation on memory and storytelling, My Mother’s Silver Fox asks whether the past can ever truly be understood—or if it will always slip through our grasp, like snow through our fingers.

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“A mesmerizing work that explores the themes of identity and memory and yearning. . . . Hotschnig’s prose, so splendidly translated by Lewis, has that quality of intimacy that only the best literary works possess.”

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“Alois Hotschnig’s novel, My Mother’s Silver Fox, portrays a turbulent state of mind that seeks to understand itself through flickerings of family history, childhood memories, and experiences in early manhood. . . . All of this is told in a recursive manner, which erodes linear time to create the dual effects of allegiance to and freedom from the past.”