The Three Felix Breit Novels
(a pen-name of Malcolm Ross-Macdonald)

The Dower House

Published by Severnhouse, Spring 2011

This is the first of the three-book Felix-Breit sequence. Having survived the horrors of the concentration camps, Jewish sculptor Felix Breit arrives in London determined to put the past behind him. When he is invited by two architect friends to set up home with them and their wives in the Dower House, an elegant Georgian mansion in the Hertfordshire countryside, Felix is only too happy to agree. And when the forthright Miss Faith Bullen-Ffitch agrees to join him, his happiness is complete. But this post-war experiment in communal living is not quite the perfect idyll the friends had hoped for. The bitter legacy of World War II has left its mark, and the ensuing tensions and disagreements seems set to tear the group apart. Then Felix meets the enigmatic Angela Wirth and is plunged into an emotional maelstrom that threatens to destroy the new life he has so carefully rebuilt.

Severn House adds to its engaging series of historical romances with the first in a new series by bestselling British author MacDonald set during in the devastating aftermath of World War II. Jewish sculptor Felix Breit has survived Nazi medical experiments at the Mauthausen concentration camp. He reaches London in 1947, where two architect friends, sensing that the war and its atrocities will utterly change humankind�s perspectives on our capacity for good and unspeakable evil, rent a 60-room country manor, the Dower House, in the hope of establishing a commune dedicated to a “post-war renaissance.” Their “community of the future” will include working class people, and all will strive for “the next stage of civilization.” There Felix finds himself warning a Frenchwoman about the scars she�ll get if she “keeps picking at the wound,” thus establishing the tale�s moral center amidst post-war tension. Blending a wellresearched setting with an unusual story line, MacDonald captures the era�s specifics, and reaches for universal truths while probing wounded psyches in a damaged world. • Whitney Scott US Booklist Review

Felix Breit is a well-respected sculptor in prewar Europe. Living in Paris after a fight with his father, he is shocked when he is arrested and sent to Mauthausen. It seems that his grandfather, a second-rate artist and vocal anti-Semite, was actually born a Jew. So Felix is a quarter Jewish, enough for the Nazi death list. Two architects he meets when he�s rescued from Mauthausen invite him to England, where he takes up their offer of an apartment and workshop in a sprawling Hertfordshire mansion. A chance meeting in the Victoria and Albert Museum brings him a lover and career-builder in the delightful form of Faith Bullen-ffitch. Among his neighbors in the building is an American bridegroom of Marianne von Ritter, whose Nazi-loving Swedish parents sent her to work in Germany; an English architect whose French wife despises Marianne; and several other ill-assorted couples. Felix is immensely attracted to Angela Wirth, a Ravensbr�ck survivor, who worked for the Nazis as a sound recorder. After secretly recording the meeting about the Final Solution, she made a transcript that she sent to the Communists, earning herself a spot in a death camp.
This series debut from prolific Macdonald (Rose of Nancemellin, 2001, etc.) explores the dynamics of the relationships between the Europeans and their very different English hosts. It�s all heartbreaking and romantic, with intimations of future happiness.Kirkus reviews
He is every bit as bad as Dickens — Martin Seymour-Smith

Strange Music

To be published by Severnhouse, Christmas 2011

Back in 1947, Felix Breit joined eight young couples to help create the Dower House community in a former stately home in Hertfordshire. There he set about rebuilding his career as one of Europe�s foremost sculptors, having spent the war partly in hiding and partly in a concentration camp. Now, in 1949, he is married to Angela, another survivor of the notorious death camps�though she started the war as a technical officer in the SS. Understandably, their marriage, though outwardly smooth, is full of unresolved tensions. But they have a rich network of support in the other eight families�chronicled here in telling and intimate detail�and especially of the sixteen children (and counting) who make up what they come to call The Tribe, a community within a community. And all against the backdrop of the four pivotal years of the last century: 1949�52, when the Britain and Europe of today were formed.

Promises to Keep

To be published by Severnhouse in the summer of 2012

In 1947, eight young, idealistic couples created the Dower House community in an ex-stately home in Hertfordshire and invited one of Europe�s leading sculptors, Felix Breit, to join them. A survivor of the Nazi death camps, he risked marrying a fellow survivor, Angela Wirth�a union that might have ended in disaster but for their intimate involvement in the lives of others in the community. All their horizons, too, have expanded, with ties to Scandinavia, Germany, and America. Most powerful and healing of all are the bonds among their 30 children, four of whom are Felix�s and Angela�s. But the past has never gone away. And ancient wounds reopen when a former death-camp guard, who was especially brutal to Angela, turns up as the wife of the children�s new headmaster.

What, if one may so put it, would Dickens be without a bit of Malcolm Macdonald?
Martin Seymour-Smith

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