The Lost Daughter by Gill Paul

Because of DNA testing, we know Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna perished along with the rest of her family in a cellar room of the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinburg. In this book, the author imagines her survival. That part, I admit, was a little hard for me to swallow, but once past that, it was an intriguing look into the lives of ordinary Russians from 2019 until the death of Stalin in 1952. Maria a child of wealth and privilege, suffers the losses, starvation and heart-stopping dangers experienced under the Lenin and Stalin regimes and comes to understand what life must have been like for many under imperial rule.

In a parallel story set in 1973, Australia, Val Scott has escaped an abusive husband and is trying to make a fresh start with her daughter. Val has questions about her parents. Why did her father send her mother back to China when Val was thirteen? Why was he such a grim and unloving man, and why did he have items connected to the Romanovs in a lock box?

It is mystifying what the two stories have in common until the last pages when they converge in a satisfying ending that only a gifted author could deliver.

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Gill Paul is the international bestselling author of thirteen novels, many of them reevaluating extraordinary twentieth-century women whom she believes have been marginalized or misjudged. Her novels have reached the top of the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Toronto Globe & Mail charts, and have been translated into twenty-three languages.