A not­ed nov­el­ist and writer of a cult clas­sic mem­oir, Ellen Ull­man has once again penned a work with the pow­er to pull in read­ers by the scruff of the neck and utter­ly enthrall them. The book is a work of fic­tion cen­tered on a dis­graced pro­fes­sor who becomes obsessed and enrap­tured with research he is doing on a woman whose sto­ry he has been sur­rep­ti­tious­ly lis­ten­ing to as she tells it to her psy­chi­a­trist on the oth­er side of his office wall. His quest leads him to the mud­bound dis­placed-per­sons camps of post­war Europe, where Jew­ish sur­vivors are trapped in a state­less lim­bo, unable to return to their for­mer homes, pre­vent­ed from emi­grat­ing to the U.S. and barred from join­ing their fel­low Zion­ists in Pales­tine.

As he dis­cov­ers truths he can’t tell to the per­son at the cen­ter of the sto­ry with­out reveal­ing that he has been lis­ten­ing in on for­bid­den con­ver­sa­tions, he sends dis­patch­es dis­guised as cor­re­spon­dence from the adop­tion agency that played a cen­tral role in the woman’s life, an agency, it turns out, that was part of a plot to traf­fic in babies left with the Catholic Church dur­ing World War II.

The result of all this action is a dark and intel­li­gent nov­el that calls into ques­tion every­thing the adopt­ed woman knows about her­self – or thinks she does – and a few choice rev­e­la­tions about the pro­fes­sor him­self.

Ull­man writes with the per­fect com­bi­na­tion of jour­nal­ist and nar­ra­tivist, two tal­ents that join forces to cre­ate a work of strength and time­less­ness. Set in San Fran­cis­co in the ​‘70s, where Ull­man lives and where she worked as a com­put­er pro­gram­mer in that tumul­tuous decade, the book brings to life both the grit­ty and the glam­orous as it unrav­els the mys­tery of the woman beyond the wall.