Susanne Ayoub Schattenbraut (Shadow Bride) Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, March 2006, 480 pp. ISBN 3-455-00221-8 Two sisters, identical twins Friederike and Johanna, grow up in Vienna between the wars. The family is a typical ‘Vienna melange’: the father, Julius Tallos, is originally from Hungary and the mother has family roots in Bohemia. The family gets by more or less with their small shop, in which they sell home-sewn gloves and fashion accessories. The economic problems of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the political tensions, the growing Austro-Fascism and the virulent anti-Semitism in all political camps make themselves clearly felt in the modest everyday life of the family. The two sisters are close confidantes and also close rivals. Johanna is out to enjoy herself and bent on training as a singer. Friederike leaves school after the death of her mother from cancer and takes on the role of housewife and businesswoman. The tensions between the two sisters escalate when they both fall in love with the same man, Raoul Sebestyen, the good-looking son of well-to-do Jewish parents in whose factory Julius Tallos once worked. Friederike loves him, Johanna fools around with him and allows him to make her pregnant. Friederike has a nervous breakdown, and runs away to Germany. Johanna loses her voice during her pregnancy. The Sebestyns sell their factory to the Tallos family – at less than its proper price – before the ‘Aryanising’ process has got into full swing. Raoul goes to the USA, his parents move to Prague. Ona, the illegitimate child, stays in Vienna with her nanny, supplied by Raoul. It is an unhappy prospect all round, and leads to some drastic reversals of fortune. Johanna has been disinherited by her father and she and her Nazi husband have to come to Friederike for money. She, by contrast, has become a sort of Cinderella figure: she is rich and respected and has married Joseph, the manager of her father’s old firm. Joseph legally adopts Ona but the girl, now thirteen years old, is neurotic and disturbed. And this is to describe no more than a section of the plot. The pacing is brisk, the dialogue assured and lively, and the tension is sustained to the end. Here is a family saga and a psycho-thriller combined, and with universal appeal.