In 1936, a group of British school children and their teacher embarked on a hike across the Schauinsland Mountain in Germany’s Black Forest – a trip which ended in disaster. Afterwards, a media frenzy in both Britain and Germany, coupled with the looming threat of war, began to obscure the truth about what really happened.

Taking this true story as its inspiration, Sarah Day’s second novel explores the role of propaganda, misinformation and populism in sowing the seeds of the Second World War, and asks whether the rhetoric in Britain and Germany shared more in common than we’d like to think.