FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

SONATA FOR MIRIAM By Linda Olsson.

287 pp. Penguin. Paper, US$15.

US cover left, NZ cover right.

For Adam Anker, a violinist and composer living in New Zealand, the past lies on the other side of the world — in Poland, where he was born during World War II, and in Sweden, where he grew up. “I have never had any connection with my past,” Adam tells an old woman who holds a clue to where he came from. “It has felt as if all I have ever had is the present.”

When Adam’s only child, Miriam, is killed in an accident, that present caves in, leaving him face to face with the mystery of his origins and the secret he kept from his daughter about hers.

Bit by bit, a group of Holocaust survivors, with their bundles of letters, photographs and memories, help Adam piece together his story — which is a mournful one indeed, but beautifully told. And it isn’t until Adam learns about his own mother’s past that he realizes the mistake he made with Miriam. “I did to my daughter what was done to me,” he tells a friend. “I made her motherless.”