Excerpt from The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He took everything home in the pockets of his coat and hid the objects in a wooden box that had once contained the cigars his father used to smoke. He smoothed out the sweet wrappers, liking the vibrant colours, and shook out the tobacco from the cigarette ends into a little tin.

When he was alone in his room, he would stare at the treasure. Sometimes, he touched it and smelled it. Keeping it hidden from Emilie – as though perhaps it was a present for her which he would one day surprise her with – was what excited him about it. The lipstick was a dark purple colour, almost black, like a boiled damson, and he found it beautiful.

He and Emilie had to spend two hours at the church, to get everything shipshape for the weekend services. During this time, a few people would come in, bundled up against the cold, and enter the pews and pray, or else go to the altar rail and stare at the amber-coloured stained-glass pietà in the west window.

Gustav saw that Emilie crept round them, as if trying to make herself invisible. Seldom did these people say 'Grüezi', or say Frau Perle's name. He watched them from his hassock. He noticed that almost all of them were old. They appeared to him as unfortunate beings, who had no secret treasure. He thought that, perhaps, they hadn't got 'the right kind of life'. He wondered whether the 'right life' might lie in the things which he alone could see – the things underneath some grating or other, over which most people heedlessly trod.

When the cleaning was done, Gustav and Emilie walked home, side by side. The trams would be running by then, and a bell chiming somewhere, and a scatter of pigeons fluttering from roof to roof, and the flower stallholder setting out her vases and buckets on the corner of Unter der Egg. The flower seller, whose name was Frau Teller, would always greet them and smile, even if snow was falling.

Unter der Egg was the name of the street in which their apartment block stood. Before these blocks had been built, Unter der Egg (Under the Harrow) had been a rural strip, where the residents of Matzlingen had been able to rent allotments and grow vegetables, but these were long gone. Now, there was just a wide pavement and a metal drinking fountain and Frau Teller's stall, which was the last reminder of green things growing in this place. Emilie sometimes said that she would have liked to grow vegetables – red cabbages, she said, and snow peas and marrows. 'But at least,' she would sigh, 'the place wasn't destroyed by the war.'

She had shown Gustav some magazine pictures of destroyed places. She said they were all outside Switzerland. Dresden. Berlin. Caen. There were no people in any of these photographs, but in one of these pictures there had been a white dog, sitting alone in a mound of rubble. Gustav asked what had happened to that dog and Emilie said, 'It's no use asking what happened, Gustav. Perhaps the dog found a good master, or perhaps it died of hunger. How can I possibly know? Everything, in the war, depended on who you were and where you were. And then destiny took over.'

Gustav stared at his mother. 'Where were we?' he said. She closed the magazine and folded it away, like a soft garment she planned to wear again in the near future. She took Gustav's face in her hands. 'We were here,' she said, 'safe in Matzlingen. For a while, when your father was Assistant Police Chief, we even had a beautiful apartment on Fribourgstrasse. It had a balcony, where I grew geraniums. I can't see a geranium plant without thinking of the ones I grew.'

'Then we came to Unter der Egg?' asked Gustav.

'Yes. Then we came to Unter der Egg.'

'Just you and me?'

'No. At first there were the three of us. But not for long.

Excerpted from The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain. Copyright © 2016 by Rose Tremain. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.