'Beautiful and supremely touching' - Keith Lowe, author of Savage Continent, Sunday Telegraph

'A serious, very moving book... a weave of narratives about five lives, connected by blood and marriage but divided by politics' -- Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books

'Simultaneously gripping and meditative, an engaging and thought-provoking portrait of a disappeared world' -- Observer

'Compelling ... [Leo] is terrific at elucidating the slow, incremental steps by which people come to lie to themselves... guile, guilt and disappointment drip from these pages and Red Love is all the more affecting for it' -- Marina Benjamin, New Statesman

'With truthful tenderness and wry humour, Maxim Leo looks back not in anger but in an effort to understand the past' -- Iain Finlayson, The Times

'Honest and sober... a convincing depiction of what everyday life was like and the legacy it has left... illuminating' -- Metro

'An absorbing and personal account that gives outsiders an insight into life in the GDR' -- Shortlist

'[Red Love] gives us extraordinary, intimate access to East Germany when the state was not just in the family apartment but locked within the minds and aspirations of all its citizens' -- Sunday Telegraph

'Red Love is an important and compelling book for many reasons, but perhaps more than anything it reminds us of the pull of family, however flawed it might be' --Susie Dent, Spectator

'Family memoirs don't come wittier than this little marvel' -- Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

'Red Love... is a memoir about three leftist German generations in a family seeking Utopia and trying to stay whole' --Neal Ascherson Glasgow Herald

'Illuminating ... Red Love offers an engaging exploration of the complex decades that caused families to become strangers to one another, and a refreshing response to the deceptively simple question: "What was it like?"' --Independent

Maxim Leo was born in 1970 in East Berlin. He studied Political Science at the Free University in Berlin and at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. Since 1997 he is Editor of the Berliner Zeitung. In 2002 he was nominated for the Egon-Erwin-Kisch Prize, and in the same year won the German-French Journalism Prize. He won the Theodor Wolff Prize in 2006. He lives in Berlin.