What Will Save Us

Pre-order now: for delivery early 2026 

When Anna marches into Karl’s hotel in the Austrian Alps and shoots a member of the waiting staff, Karl sees what few in his position would: an opportunity. It’s insights like this that make the German Secret Service keen to keep him on their payroll, and the British Secret Service keen to keep him on theirs too. Soon, Anna finds herself stationed as a ‘field agent’ – a nanny to a British family with murky loyalties and strong ties to the Nazi party, keeping her ears open for anything that can help Karl root out Agent 33, his counterpart double agent feeding secrets the other way, from Britain back to Germany.

If Karl cannot unmask Agent 33, the war could be lost before it begins. But Karl has always had one eye fixed on another enemy: the Nazi officer he watched murder his mother years ago, a man whose sudden reappearance threatens to derail everything. For Anna, the mission carries an even more devastating secret. The family she serves is raising the child she was forced to surrender, and she will risk anything to bring her baby back into her arms – even if it means jeopardising her cover.

Into this dangerous triangle steps Elise, drawn back into a life of espionage she thought she had escaped, whose own painful history binds her fate to Karl and Anna in ways none of them can foresee.

Set across Britain, Germany and Austria in the tense months leading up to the Second World War, What Will Save Us is a thrilling, intimate spy story that weaves revenge, betrayal and impossible choices with a chilling political atmosphere. Claire Seeber casts her storyteller's gaze not on the great leaders and generals, but on the ordinary women and men whose messy, broken lives may end up changing the course of history.