The entry begins:
Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook is set in 1946. The story moves from an exhausted, bombed out London to the devastation of post war Germany. Main character, Edith Graham, is late thirties, an unmarried teacher who has spent the war looking after her mother and teaching school. Desperate for change and to make a contribution, she volunteers to go to Germany to help with re-construction. While in London, she stays with her friend, the exotic, exciting ex SOE agent Dori. At Dori’s house she meets and is immediately attracted to Latvian Jewish Brigade Officer, Harry Hirsch, who is also going to Germany.Visit Celia Rees's website.
Edith’s cousin, Leo, works for MI6 and recruits Edith to help search for fugitive Nazi War Criminals. One in particular, Dr Kurt von Stavenow, with whom Edith had a passionate affair before the war. Von Stavenow was involved in the Euthanasia Project: the elimination of the mentally unfit and precursor to the Holocaust. What Edith doesn’t know is that her cousin wants to use von Stavenow, not punish him. She is also tasked with finding his wife, Elisabeth von Stavenow.
Adeline Parnell, an American journalist and photographer, tells Edith about Operation Paperclip, run by the American Secret Service to find ‘useful’ Nazi scientists and give them new identities. She knows about this from Tom McHale, ex OSS, now CIA. Dori suspects that the British are doing the same thing and Edith agrees to send back information coded into recipes to escape the attention of censors.
Casting
Edith Graham – Olivia Colman
Very English, not conventionally beautiful but her expressive eyes command attention. She can play surface prim and proper but with the potential to surprise. She has tremendous emotional range from doubt and vulnerability to steely resolve and would...[read on]
Q&A with Celia Rees.
My Book, The Movie: Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook.
--Marshal Zeringue
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