This is the story of Billy and the baron's entrancing daughter, Karin, and the dangerous paths they travel as their childhood attachment deepens to a complex love overshadowed by the rise of the Nazis. Their story takes us from a golden Edwardian summer on the Isle of Wight to London under Zeppelin attack to Ireland on the brink of its War of Independence and at last to Germany in the darkening Weimar period, where Billy and Karin come of age in a country wounded by war and seething with hatreds. On Baron von Weinbrenner's stud farm outside Frankfurt, they share a passion for racehorses and for the Wild West novels of Karl May, whose dream of escape to El Llano Estacado, a richly imagined New Mexico landscape, becomes a powerful beacon of freedom as Germany marches toward Hitler, war, and the Holocaust.
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