1938 China, Meilin flees the encroaching Japanese with her son and a beautiful scroll embellished with stories, which was a gift from her beloved husband. On the road, sometimes with her brother in law and his wife and daughters, she reads the stories to her son to help him keep his courage. Over the course …
Although this story is about war, and all the sadness and destruction that goes with that, it has a really beautiful fairy tale quality to it as well. A blind young girl grows up with her father in Paris. He is the locksmith at a museum, and he builds her a complete model of the …
Continue reading All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
During World War II, Britain sent spies into Occupied France, many of whom were women. This book tells the story of what that experience would have been like. Marian Sutro has fled to England with her parents and brother, and finds herself selected, as a French speaker, to go undercover to France to assist …
Continue reading The Girl Who Fell From The Sky – Simon Mawer
A novel in letters, the sole novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and completed and published posthumously by her relative, Annie Barrows. In tone, it’s very much like the letters between the Mitford sisters, and is by turns funny, delightful, tragic and touching. It follows protagonist Juliet, a writer, who receives a letter from a man …
I think what strikes you first about de Bernieres is how human is writing is. It's mundane, describes the ordinary, or perhaps ordinary people caught up in history, in change. While war wages around the sleeping, pastoral island of Cephallonia, for example, goats must still be milked, fathers scolded and meals shared, distant politics debated, …
Continue reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
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