1941: when Anna Seghers finally manages to escape from Europe, she has no inkling of the extent to which the years she will spend in Mexico will shape her life. Under the Mexican sun, she achieves overnight fame with the publication of The Seventh Cross in the USA. She writes her most important works, and experiences both the loss of her mother, whom she was unable to rescue from Nazi Germany, and her own mortality, as she almost loses her memory and her own life in a terrible road accident. She writes herself slowly back to life with the novella The Dead Girls’ Outing. Her epoch-making novel Transit is also written during her Mexican exile. In Mexico City between 1941 and 1947, she not only meets Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Pablo Neruda, but German communists and Jews in exile, who are struggling with Stalinism just as she is. In the midst of the exuberant colours, the glittering light and a culture that celebrates death, the longing for Europe remains...