29 July 2021
‘You’ll learn to be too much, too. I think it might help.’ 
When Julia flees her unhappy marriage for the handsome tailor Eve Perret, she expects her life from now on will be a challenge, not least because the year is 1911. They leave everything behind to settle in Vienna, but their happiness is increasingly diminished by Julia’s longing for a child.
Ada Bauer’s wealthy industrialist family have sent her to Dr Freud in the hope that he can fix her mutism and do so without a scandal. But help will soon come for Ada from an unexpected quarter and change many lives irrevocably.
All of You Every Single One is an epic novel about family, freedom and how true love might survive impossible odds.
Read an extract below.
PROLOGUE
The lake is freezing. The words – gelid, boreal, glacial – don’t do it justice. Chunks of the whole break away, float and sink. Black oiliness, the consistency of nightmares; impossible to see where you should put your feet.
Snow is falling, silent and determined. The beach is quickly smothered – the pebbles, the upturned boat and the reeds become mere grey shapes. The lawn, sloping upwards to the house, glitters. The occupants are in the deep sleep of the very cold. They knew the storm was coming, but the body does not always understand what it’s told the first time. The blood retreats in such circumstances to the inner organs; fingers curl into soft palms; the hair forms a nest around the neck and shoulders.
The nursery is different. In this room, the fire burns all night – it’s hard enough to get a three-week-old to sleep without the added complication of the cold. The baby is awake, waving her fists in vague figures of eight, staring up at the woman bending over the crib, who makes a shushing sound, and though the child is too small to understand, or to make out more than the blurred outline of a face, she closes her eyes.
An ember from the fire lands on the rug. The woman stares at it as it flares and dies. She picks up the haversack, in which are packed cloth nappies, blankets, some stale bread that won’t be missed and fifty Kronen stolen from Herr K.’s wallet. The baby is gathered up in a bundle of warmth and cloth. She turns to the door, opens and listens: the rasp of the butler’s snoring. She spares a thought for him – he has always been kind to her – then walks down the corridor and hesitates at the top of the stairs. The child smacks her lips in the darkness as she creeps on.
In the downstairs hallway, she puts the baby, very gently, on to the carpet runner and goes to accomplish the business of covering her tracks. On her return, she unhooks her coat from the coat-rack next to the front door. It is even colder on this level, heat rising, as it will; she can feel her fingers stiffening already. She lifts the coat and shrugs it on.
An oil lamp has been wavering, unnoticed, along the corridor from the back of the house: gold corona, craggy shadows. A man’s face, bruised with sleep. His fingers, where they hold the lamp base, are a throbbing, sea-anemone pink.
‘I heard a noise,’ he says.
He must already know something is wrong, but he has always been slow to cross into the waking world. He raises one fist to grind it into his eye – trying to appear charming and childlike, even now – and with the other he puts the lamp on the hall table. The halo moves, showing him what’s on the floor: the blind-mouse eyes and pale round face, bundled in bonnet and blankets. The bag.
‘Where are you taking her?’ he asks. The beginnings of a sneer. ‘Out for a walk?’
She snatches up the first lamp and brings it round in a wide arc; it connects with his temple. The clunk of bone sinking tectonically into itself: if she’s lucky, a compound depressed fracture of the left parietal bone. He folds to the floor like a cheap prima donna, and she picks up his daughter and moves to the door. Oil has spilled on the carpet and the lamp is extinguished. There is no blood that she can see. The door creaks as it opens but it is too late to worry about that. She steps out into the suffocating quiet of the snowstorm.
In fairy tales, such things happen at midnight. In fact, it is half past two in the morning, in a home belonging to the prominent Bauer family – the engineering Bauers – in the small community of Podersdorf on the shores of the Neusiedlersee, Austria’s largest lake. It is 1913, and somebody in this house is stealing a baby.