THE BUDAPEST EMBER

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Twelve days. One corner of one street. A choice neither of them can take back.

Budapest, October 1956. The statue of Stalin comes down on a Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning the city belongs to whoever is willing to stand in it.

Andras Fekete is twenty-two, a medical student who has never held a rifle, holding a corner on Üllői út because someone has to. Sarah Quinn is an American Red Cross auditor who came to inspect supply inventories and missed the last evacuation bus out. They meet across a field-clinic table, in a language neither of them speaks well, with his arm burned and her hands steady.

They have twelve days.

What grows between them is built entirely out of things that cannot be said - not by a Hungarian whose father wears the wrong uniform, not by an American whose government has already decided how this ends. Every hour they spend together costs something. Every hour apart costs more.

Then the radio goes quiet, and the tanks turn around, and the border begins to close.

The Budapest Ember is a love story about the price of staying and the price of leaving - about a brass compass passed hand to hand across a continent, and the small, unrecorded decencies that outlive the regimes that tried to erase them.

Book Three of the Cold War Hearts series. Each novel stands alone. Each is set in a different city, at a different flashpoint, with a different couple - and one object connects them all.

• Sweeping, meticulously researched historical romance


• Slow-burn, forbidden, opposite-sides love story


• Dual point of view, alternating chapters


• An emotionally earned ending, at genuine cost


• No cliffhanger - a complete story in one volume

For readers of Kristin Hannah, Kate Quinn, and Beatriz Williams.