Grete Weil was born in Munich in 1906, the daughter of a Jewish lawyer. When the Nazis came to power, she emigrated to Holland with her husband, the playwright and director Erich Weil. In 1941, Erich was arrested; he later died in a concentration camp. Grete went into hiding, and it was then that she began to write, first theater pieces, then fiction. After the war, she returned to Germany, and eventually settled near her native Munich, where she lived from 1947 until her death, at age 93, in 1996. She was the author of five novels, a memoir, and several collections of short fiction. The original German edition of Aftershocks was first published in Zurich in 1992.