When nine–year–old Nina is bundled on to a train to escape from the Germans who have already crossed the border into Latvia, she is thankfully unaware of the future. Two wars and a revolution later, she knows all about exile and displacement but also about love and the necessity to hold on to some form of hope, even when it is paper–thin and almost invisible.
This is a true story spread across four countries and more than eighty years, and although it is Nina's story, it is also the story of Nina's family and of the many other people who shared both her life and her experiences. It was a story that, had it not been captured on paper, would have disappeared backwards into the fog of time and would soon have been forgotten. Even now, there are so few people who remember the first part of the twentieth century, and it is important that the memories remaining can be safeguarded.
There is a space in between the beginning and the end, between joy and loss, between light and dark... This is the space where everything happens. We spend our lives caught in this space in between, and the space changes depending on different perspectives and the people in the space. It is a space filled with stories. The Space in Between is one of these stories.
The Space in Between took several years to research and almost as long to write. It is spread across four countries and almost a century. From the perspective of the injustice and the inhumanity associated with war, it is a story that has been repeated many times, in many parts of the world, yet this particular story is Nina's own personal story. The question of refugees – the collateral of war – becomes an important part of the book, and although the reasons for people fleeing their country are clear, the book offers no solution to the problem, which is ongoing.
