Nazi persecution, oppression behind the Iron Curtain, the struggle of strangers in a strange land. This sombre history haunts the adults in Ann Beaglehole's novel Replacement Girl while their children expand into the bright, wide open landscape of their adopted country.Set in fifties to seventies Wellington, Replacement Girl vividly brings the immigrant experience to life. The story moves back and forwards in time and between New Zealand and Budapest, as Eva grows up in a family struggling with the after-effects of earlier losses and adjustment to a new culture. Eva and her group of four friends, all immigrant children and 'different', have to make their own adjustments and choices to survive and thrive in 1950s Wellington. They just want to leave the parents' past behind and live the carefree life of their schoolmates.With sensitivity and humour, Ann Beaglehole takes the reader inside the immigrant experience so that we see mid-century New Zealand through their eyes. Replacement Girl explores the tensions between generations and cultures. It is a story of love, relationships and cross-cultural marriage.

Focuses on the lives of the children of wartime immigrants, whose perceptions and experiences of both the old and the new world were very different from their parents'. At school, in the neighbourhood, or on the sportsfield, many of them were painfully aware of being 'outsiders' in a society unused to cultural diversity. Yet their need to belong was frequently complicated by loyalty to the very different ideals and expectations of their parents. Based on a wide range of interviews as well as documentary evidence from second-generation refugees worldwide, this is an account of the lives of immigrant children growing up in the decades between the 1940s and the 1960s.