Tag Archives: Second World War

#BookReview ‘The English Führer’ by Rory Clements #thriller #WW2

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It is autumn 1945 and Cambridge history professor Tom Wilde, American citizen, has returned to his daytime job. The war is over. Or is it. The English Führer, seventh in the Tom Wilde spy series by Rory Clements, hits the ground running as a Japanese submarine waits off the coast of Norfolk. Rory ClementsYet again, Tom and his wife Lydia are in danger. But Lydia is living in a hostel in London as she trains as a doctor – pretending to be a single woman in order to qualify for study – while Tom and Johnny have a new housekeeper at home in Cambridge. When the quiet Norfolk village next to an American airbase is subjected to a strange plague, its residents dead and dying, Wilde finds himself pulled back into the world of the security services. He calls on familiar faces – Philip Eaton of MI6, ‘Dagger’ Templeman of MI5, old friend and GP Rupert Weir and Bill Donovan, Wilde’s old boss of America’s wartime security service, Office of Strategic Services [OSS] – and new ones, some of whom may not be who they appear to be. As a spy during the war, Tom has grown used to dissembling but acting a role is a new territory for Lydia who must convincingly appear to be unmarried and not a mother, or be thrown out of St Ursula’s Hospital Medical School. New characters include Lydia’s fellow medical student, room-mate and addict of spy stories Miranda March; Danny Oswick, new history student with a dodgy moustache and even dodgier past; and widow Syliva Keane who moves into the Wilde house as Tom’s new housekeeper in Cambridge but who disappears once a week.
As previously, Wilde must work out who to trust, treading a fine line between wrong and right, to get to the heart of the truth. What is a Japanese biological weapon doing in England and who are the plotters? Japanese. Fascists. Communists. The clues are myriad and the web woven by Clements is at times impenetrable, the story telling is compelling.
A series that is so addictive that when you finish one book you want to start the next immediately.

Click the title to read my reviews of the other books in the Tom Wilde series:-
CORPUS #1TOMWILDE
NUCLEUS #2TOMWILDE
NEMESIS #3TOMWILDE
HITLER’S SECRET #4TOMWILDE
A PRINCE AND A SPY #5TOMWILDE
THE MAN IN THE BUNKER #6TOMWILDE

And from the Sebastian Wolff series:-
MUNICH WOLF #1SEBASTIANWOLFF

If you like this, try:-
‘The Diamond Eye’ by Kate Quinn
‘The Partisan’ by Patrick Worrall
‘An Officer and a Spy’ by Robert Harris

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE ENGLISH FÜHRER by Rory Clements https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-6tH via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Nicola Cornick

#BookReview ‘All the Broken Places’ by @JohnBoyneBooks #WW2

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John Boyne is a fine writer. All the Broken Places, his sequel to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, examines the nature of grief and guilt, of living a long life of secrets. Its some years since I read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas but All the Broken Places stands on its own and can be read independently. John BoyneGretel Fernsby is ninety-one. It is London 2022 as she nervously awaits the new neighbours expected to move into the downstairs flat. She likes familiarity, routine, being anonymous. Gretel carries the guilt of something that happened in the war and which she has hidden, and lived with, for eighty years. The opening sentence sets up the story succinctly. ‘If every man is guilty of all the good he did not do, as Voltaire suggested, then I have spent a lifetime convincing myself that I am innocent of all the bad.’ Boyne explores the concepts of individual and collective guilt, of the sin of inaction, of the culpability of children and the offence of looking away.
Gretel’s younger brother was The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, their father commandant at Auschwitz. She buried all memories of her brother, unable to speak his name or say it silently in her own head, but is unable to forget him. We follow her life after the war, to France and Australia and finally to England. Always, she lives a life of secrets. Until the past comes bursting forth when nine-year old Henry moves in downstairs and Gretel sees his tears, his bruises, his silences. The memories come flooding back. As she considers whether to step in and defend Henry, she must risk revealing what she has hidden for eighty years. Will Gretel find a kind of peace?
It’s the best book I’ve read so far in 2023. There are surprises at the end, some beautiful detail. Emotional but never sentimental, Boyne doesn’t shy away from the horror of the Holocaust. Powerful and uncomfortable.

Click the title to read my reviews of these other novels by John Boyne:-
A HISTORY OF LONELINESS
A LADDER TO THE SKY
A TRAVELLER AT THE GATES OF WISDOM
STAY WHERE YOU ARE AND THEN LEAVE
THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES… Curious? Read the first paragraph of THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES here.
WATER #1ELEMENTS
EARTH #2ELEMENTS

If you like this, try:-
‘The Aftermath’ by Rhidian Brook
‘Inflicted’ by Ria Frances
‘The Bird in the Bamboo Cage’ by Hazel Gaynor

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview ALL THE BROKEN PLACES by @JohnBoyneBooks https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-646 via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:-
Fiona Leitch

#BookReview ‘Homeland’ by Clare Francis #WW2 #mystery

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Homeland by Clare Francis is set after World War Two in the quiet rural corner of England that is the Somerset Levels. A land of rising and ebbing water levels, and unworldly place of withies and willows.Clare Francis Into this walks Billy Greer on his return from the war, going back to the house of his uncle and aunt where he spent the difficult teenage years before the war. There, he finds the house and farm in disarray, his uncle dramatically aged, and his aunt upstairs confined to bed after a stroke. And he meets again the woman who made his spine tingle when they were both teenagers.
Will he stay to rebuild the farm, or will he go to the promised job in London. And what of Annie, the local girl he could not forget while he fought his way around Europe?
Underlying the telling of Billy’s story is that of the Polish soldiers, in a holding camp while they await either return to Poland or settlement in the UK. It is a difficult decision: their beloved country is unrecognizable and run by the Soviet Union, but they do not feel 100% welcome in England. Wladyslaw, a literature student who left university to join the Polish army, is an intellectual and a dreamer. But he takes a job working for Billy Greer, helping to set the rundown farm to rights. And there he meets local schoolteacher Stella who agrees to give him English lessons.
This feels like a quiet tale – and it is not a thriller in the ‘spy story’ definition – but it is a story which kept me turning the pages. There are many uncertainties: the future of the Poles, the various love triangles, locals and immigrants living alongside each other without a common language with inevitable arguments and misunderstandings. The denouement is not what I expected.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Aftermath’ by Rhidian Brook
‘The Translation of Love’ by Lynne Kutsukake
‘Freya’ by Anthony Quinn

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview HOMELAND by Clare Francis http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Dt via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Mrs Sinclair’s Suitcase’ by @Louisewalters12 #romance #WW2

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rs Sinclair’s Suitcase by Louise Walters is a gentle mystery of a love affair during war and its consequences for the following generations. Louise Walters We follow the stories of two women: Dorothy Sinclair in 1940, and today Roberta who works at The Old and New Bookshop. Roberta is particularly fond of the secondhand stock, treasuring the notes and letters she finds hidden within their pages, wondering about the stories of the writer and the addressee. Each chapter starts with an excerpt from such a note.
The letter which starts Chapter One is dated 1941 and addressed to “My dear Dorothea” from Jan Pietrykowski in which he writes he “cannot forgive” her for “what you do, to this child, to this child’s mother, it is wrong.” The letter makes no sense to Roberta as it was written by her grandfather to her grandmother, and dated 1941 when Jan died in 1940. This is the puzzle which Roberta must unravel. What woman does Jan refer to, and what child?
Dorothy’s story starts with a plane crash. She lives on the edge of an airfield deep in the quiet Lincolnshire countryside, alone in her cottage [her husband is away at war] which she shares with two land girls. The plane crash brings the Polish pilot to her door. Nervous, Dorothy serves afternoon tea. She “watched Jan take a bite from a sandwich. His teeth were small, even and white. She noticed the way his fingers curved lightly around the sandwich. He was an elegant man… She watched him eat and he seemed unabashed, eating under her scrutiny. She, for her part, always ate guardedly. She hated the way eating contorted her face, and it made her feel exposed.” From their first meeting, he unsettles her. She is so buttoned-up; he is open, curious and confident.
There is a lot of sensuality in this tale. Despite herself, Dorothy wonders about the pilot. She does not miss her husband. When Jan visits the cottage again, she notices his “brown, lean, strong forearms and realizes how she feels… His arms were poetry.” But there is grief too, as this is wartime and what happened in the 1940s knocks on down the decades to affect Roberta, her father and her grandmother Babunia.

Here’s my review of A LIFE BETWEEN US, also by Louise Walters.

If you like this, try:-
‘At Mrs Lippincote’s’ by Elizabeth Taylor
‘The Paying Guests’ by Sarah Waters
‘After the Bombing’ by Clare Morrall

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview MRS SINCLAIR’S SUITCASE by @Louisewalters12 http://wp.me/p5gEM4-Na via @SandraDanby