Spies — Marcel Beyer

The young cousins at the center of this gripping novel know they are different from their playmates. Their dark eyes alone set them apart. And as they look at family photo-graphs, the blank spaces between the pictures lead them to wonder about their mysterious past.
Who is the beautiful opera singer, the woman with "Italian eyes"? What happened to their grandfather, a pilot with a secret Luftwaffe unit in the Spanish Civil War? Could he still be alive? And why does his second wife forbid the children to speak of the family's history?
Questions become suspicions, secrets and rumors become wild insinuations. Combining clues from their own lives with traces of their family's past, the young detectives move from generation to generation. As fact and fiction merge into one, it slowly becomes clear that the truth is maddeningly elusive in this evocative, lyrical, and engrossing tale.