The Things We Cannot Say

Same author, same obsession with buried family truths — but a contemporary family drama built around one mother's hidden past instead of wartime romance.

Rimmer again builds the story around adult children uncovering what a parent never told them, here through an elderly father's dementia and a long-ago disappearance. The wartime Poland of The Things We Cannot Say is swapped for a present-day family reckoning, so the pull is the slow unveiling of secrets rather than survival. It suits readers who came to Rimmer for the intergenerational mystery and want to see what she does outside a war setting.

A Polish family torn apart by the Nazi occupation, drawn from the author's own grandparents' history — the same occupied-Poland ground, stretched across one whole family.

The same dual-timeline engine: a modern heroine chasing an old family question collides with a woman's hidden war story in occupied Europe.

A present-day woman digs into her grandmother's unexplained past, opening onto a real historical injustice — the dual-timeline family-secret shape without the war.

Civilians fleeing across eastern Europe in the war's final winter, told through four young voices — the same ordinary-people-in-occupied-territory focus.