“From Place To Place“
by Dr. Sonja Strode (published 2026)

About the book...

In 1940, fourteen years old Hans Verret was unexpectedly thrown into the start of life–changing experiences: Stalin’s military ‘tiger’ was at Tallinn’s gates…

In 1941, three years of military occupation of Estonia, by Nazi Germany, began.

As World War Two was ending, Hans’s beloved country was seized yet again by Stalin. Power and control, however, are never completely dictated by ‘Goliaths’. Resistance can enter the adversarial ‘stage’, playing its part via an individual or group. The Forest Brothers, operating in Estonia, was one such resistance group; Hans figured amongst them.

By the end of the 1940s, Hans had become part of a migratory group of thousands of Estonians fleeing repression, death, or their likely forcible deportation to the gruelling Siberian gulags. Britain, especially Wales, became Hans’s new home.

What happened to Hans, to some of his family and to one of his subsequent descendants – notably, his daughter and her musician husband – is the subject of this harrowing, yet often humorous and quite remarkable tale.

Into her latest novel “From Place To Place”, author Dr. Sonja Strode imaginatively weaves together fact, fiction and a measure of autobiography. Since she has been steeped in aspects of Welsh and Estonian culture and history, along with Sixties’ London, inevitably music is never far away in her mind, in her writing...