Tag Archives: novels set in WW2

#BookReview ‘The Last Lifeboat’ by Hazel Gaynor @HazelGaynor #WW2

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What an emotional rollercoaster this book is. I’ve read a lot of fiction set during World War Two but The Last Lifeboat by Hazel Gaynor is a new take on wartime conflict and its effect on ordinary people. Children are being evacuated on ships, sent to safety in Canada, travelling in convoy across the Atlantic where German u-boats wait to attack. When the worst happens, Gaynor asks what does it take to survive?Hazel GaynorEngland 1940. After a short first chapter set in the lifeboat immediately after the u-boat attack, the story tracks back four months earlier. Alice King is a schoolteacher-now-librarian in Kent, a quiet job in a quiet place, but she longs to do something with her life. In London, widow Lily Nicholls considers the hard decision to send her two children, Georgie ten and younger brother Arthur, on an evacuation ship to Canada. Invasion threatens and the Blitz is just beginning. Lily struggles with competing fears, that her children may be killed in the bombing expected in London or that having sent them away for their safety they may die en-route or stay in Canada so she will never see them again. Lily is a daily help at a household in Richmond. Her employer Mrs Carr has already sent her two eldest children privately to Canada and the third, Molly, will go as soon as she’s recovered from a horse-riding accident. Deciding to register Georgie and Arthur and decide nearer the time, Lily queues next to a woman who introduces herself as mother of five Ada Fortune.
When Lily says goodbye to her children, she hands them into the care of ‘Auntie Alice,’ an escort with the Children’s Overseas Reception Board [CORB]. It is Alice’s first journey and she is excited, nervous, and worried about her pregnant sister Kitty left home alone. When the ship is torpedoed at night by a German u-boat there is enormous confusion. It is dark, disorientating, most people are asleep, distress drills forgotten. Alice finds herself the lone woman in a lifeboat of men and seven children, some from her own group, others are strangers. Thirty-five souls.
The story unfolds – and we already know Alice will be adrift in a lifeboat – through the eyes of Alice and Lily. It’s a slow mover at first as the scene is set but after the sinking, both women are waiting. One is hoping for rescue not daring to think of the alternative, the other hopeful then despairing, finally angry. Gaynor is especially good at writing the children, their characters, their influence on the adults, their bravery and ability to look beyond the horrible present up to the stars in the sky.
Inspired by the real life sinking in September 1940 of a vessel carrying ‘seavacuees,’ child refugees, Gaynor has brought new air to a story that made headlines and generated many letters of complaints when it happened, but is unfamiliar today. I’ve not been disappointed by a novel by Hazel Gaynor yet, she’s fast becoming one of my must-read authors.

Try the #FirstPara of THE LAST LIFEBOAT.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Hazel Gaynor:-
THE BIRD IN THE BAMBOO CAGE
THE COTTINGLEY SECRET

If you like this, try:-
‘The Collaborator’s Daughter’ by Eva Glyn
‘The Garden of Angels’ by David Hewson
‘A Beautiful Spy’ by Rachel Hore

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE LAST LIFEBOAT by Hazel Gaynor @HazelGaynor https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-7au via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Suzanne Collins

#BookReview ‘The Ends of the Earth’ by Robert Goddard #WW2 #thriller

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Don’t do what I did, and read the first two books in this series by Robert Goddard and then leave 12 months before reading The Ends of the Earth, the third. Ideally this trilogy should be read back to back, in full sun when sitting on a sunlounger. The story runs along at a cracking pace, with dense plotting, loads of characters, politics, spies and locations from Europe to Japan. The pace of this, the third book, is constant, hardly time to draw a breath. Robert GoddardQuestions that I had forgotten about from the first book are revisited, challenged and solved. Japan is the scene for the climax of this tale of James Maxted, ‘Max’, and his hunt for the truth about his father’s death. But this is so much more than a single case of murder, on it hangs the future of post-Great War Europe and the twentieth-century relationship of Japan and America. At times things happen which seem a little convenient, a person turns out to have a skill or history of which we knew nothing before, but I forgave Goddard for this. He is a prime storyteller. It is clear he knows his settings – Paris, Marseilles, Switzerland, Japan – and this adds to the verisimilitude.
In this rollicking spy story, Goddard examines the nature of courage. Max finds himself drawing on the type of bravery he needed to survive in the Royal Flying Corps. “He was not surprised by how calm he felt, how undismayed by what lay before him. He had discovered his aptitude for taking risks early in the war. ‘You should be more careful, sir,’ Sam had said to him more than once. And Max had always given the same reply. ‘Being careful is what gets a chap killed.’ Eventually, he had come to believe that. And it was a belief that had served him well. So far.”

Read my reviews of Goddard’s other books:-
THE WAYS OF THE WORLD #1WIDEWORLD
THE CORNERS OF THE GLOBE #2WIDEWORLD
PANIC ROOM
THE FINE ART OF INVISIBLE DETECTION #1UMIKOWADA
THIS IS THE NIGHT THEY COME FOR YOU #1SUPERINTENDENTTALEB

If you like this, try:-
‘Midnight in Europe’ by Alan Furst
‘Stay Where You Are and Then Leave’ by John Boyne
‘Slow Horses’ by Mick Herron #1SLOUGHHOUSE

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE ENDS OF THE EARTH by Robert Goddard http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1O8 via @SandraDanby 

#BookReview ‘The Corners of the Globe’ by Robert Goddard #WW2 #thriller

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The Corners of the Globe is a very fast-moving sequel by Robert Goddard, second in his Wide World series. There’s a Scotland to London train chase complete with spies, a captured German warship, murder, kidnapping, secret codes and jumping on and off trains which would rival The 39 Steps [which Goddard playfully has one of his characters read in the restaurant car of one of the trains]. Robert GoddardGreat War flying hero James Maxted is in London, convinced that the death of his father [in the first book] is not as simple as it appeared. His investigations take him further into danger, into the dark and deadly preview of the Second World War. You really do need to read book one first [see the link below for my review] although there is a little exposition at the beginning in the form of a Secret Service report, but to be honest it functions more as a recap for the reader who has read the first book than as an introduction for a newcomer.
I failed to guess the ending of the first book, did I guess the ending of this one correctly? No.

Read my reviews of Goddard’s other books:-
THE WAYS OF THE WORLD #1WIDEWORLD  
THE ENDS OF THE EARTH #3WIDEWORLD  
PANIC ROOM
THE FINE ART OF INVISIBLE DETECTION #1UMIKOWADA
THIS IS THE NIGHT THEY COME FOR YOU #1SUPERINTENDENTTALEB

If you like this, try:-
‘Corpus’ by Rory Clements #1TOMWILDE
‘The Second Midnight’ by Andrew Taylor
‘Noonday’ by Pat Barker #3LIFECLASS

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE CORNERS OF THE GLOBE by Robert Goddard via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-19H