Andy Andrews has written this novel as if it was a personal memoir and sometimes it’s hard to remember that this didn’t really happen. But, it could have. The historical facts about a WWII German submarine sinking off the Gulf coast of Alabama are woven throughout the story. Actual photographs of people who lived there at the time and of the German sailors and their ship technically make this book a historical fiction, but its first person narrative reads like a memoir.
We learn about Andy and his family as they struggle with family issues that are all too common in the twenty-first century, but most of the book takes place in 1945. When Andy finds the sixty-year-old relics of a Nazi sailor in his back yard, he begins to investigate how they came to be buried on his property. The tale he unearths from an elderly couple, Helen Mason and her English husband, changes Andy’s life.