Kafka's Last Love: the mystery of Dora Diamant Kathi Diamant Secker & Warburg, 402pp, £16.99 ISBN 0436209950

In August 1999, on the 47th anniversary of Dora Diamant's death, her remaining family and friends placed a headstone on her previously unmarked grave in the United Synagogue cemetery in East Ham, London. Etched into the white marble are the words written by a close friend the day after Dora's lover, Franz Kafka, died: "Who knows Dora, knows what love means."

The ceremony might never have happened but for the passion and persistence of an American journalist, Kathi Diamant. When, as a 19-year-old student, she discovered that Dora Diamant had been Kafka's last mistress, Kathi hoped they were related (they are not), but the subsequent search has consumed almost 20 years of her life.

Unlike Kafka's previous lovers, Dora has been little more than a footnote to his life, and virtually ignored by Kafka scholars. Diamant's biography will change all that. It is a moving and generous account - not just of that fateful last year of Kafka's life, but of the remarkable woman who shared it and whose devotion survived some of 20th-century Europe's worst excesses.

Dora's life was changed for ever by her relationship with Kafka. They met in 1923 when she was working at a children's summer camp in the Baltic resort of Muritz. A spirited Polish Jew, she had fled her strict Orthodox family to pursue secular Zionism in Germany. She was 25 (although Kafka's great friend and biographer Max Brod recorded her age as "19 or 20", which she never bothered to correct) and Kafka was 15 years older, already greatly weakened by the tuberculosis that would kill him a year later.

As Diamant observes, "they represented the opposite ends of European Jewry". Kafka was captivated by Dora's youth and vibrancy, her eastern European Jewish heritage and her command of Hebrew and Yiddish. She persuaded him finally to leave his parents' home in Prague and live with her in Berlin in anticipation of their shared Zionist dream of emigrating to Palestine.

Diamant brings their Berlin idyll vividly to life. Despite the crippling inflation and political unrest of Germany in the 1920s, they insulated themselves in Berlin's leafy suburbs, living quietly, reading and studying Hebrew.

Dora's Kafka was charismatic, charming and gentle, interested in everything - a portrait vastly at odds with the anguished introvert of his books and letters. But after a harsh winter, Kafka had to be moved to a sanatorium outside Vienna. They were forced to travel in an open car and Dora, so the story goes, stood in front of him during the four-hour journey to protect him from the wind and rain.

When he died in June 1924, Dora was inconsolable, yet with characteristic resourcefulness she returned to Berlin and became an actress. She joined the Communist Party and married the political activist Ludwig "Lutz" Lask with whom she had a daughter, Marianne, when she was 36. But Kafka's last notebooks and the 35 letters that Dora had saved (despite his request that she burn everything) were confiscated by the Gestapo, and the Lask family fled to Russia. At the height of Stalin's purges, Lutz was arrested by the NKVD and deported to Siberia.

The greatest remaining mystery is how Dora, in 1938, as a marked Jewish communist, managed to escape from the Soviet Union with a young child and travel across Nazi-occupied Europe to Holland. Her destination was England, and the Jewish community in Whitechapel, but she was turned away from Harwich five times before being admitted in August 1939, and then interned on the Isle of Man as an "enemy alien" when war was declared.

Yet England became a sanctuary. Most of her family perished in the Holocaust, but in 1949, she was reunited with her brother and sister on a visit to the newly created state of Israel. She declared it her spiritual home. But back in London, she became very ill and died of nephritis in 1952, aged 54. Marianne tried valiantly to make a new life for herself, but she had always been physically and mentally frail, and died penniless and alone, aged only 48.

Thanks to Kathi Diamant's exhaustive research and commitment, Dora's story is still a work in progress. A second diary has been discovered recently, Michael Nyman is writing an opera about her, and if further searches through the Gestapo archives reveal Kafka's missing notebooks and letters, that will open up new chapters in both their lives. As Kafka himself once said: "I am a memory come alive. Hence the inability to sleep . . ."

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