In 1935, aged fourteen, Ilse Gross fled Germany. Alone. Seventeen years later she published her audacious first novel Fire in the Sun. Her pen name: Kathrine Talbot. Her German Jewish identity carefully concealed. The book explores the life of a refugee who lost her parents and sister in the Holocaust and who resisted telling their stories until almost too late. Only at the end of her life did she turn her family's fate into prose. Ribbat follows a nearly forgotten 20th century novelist from an Isle of Man internment camp to Cornwall, New York and California, and then to a green hill in Sussex. She marries English painter Kit Barker and clashes with macho bohemians. She rises to literary fame and comes back down to obscurity. As Ilse Barker she shares a close friendship with American poet Elizabeth Bishop. In their extraordinary letters they cover everything from the mundane to the traumatic. The author fuses literary biography and concise accounts of the German Jewish refugee experience in Britain. To scholars in Jewish studies, modern fiction and life writing this book offers an original case study. To a general audience it presents a gripping tale of creativity, joy, and pain.