Everyone Brave is Forgiven / Chris Cleave

Mary is a very upper-crusty native of London. When Britain and France declare war against Germany in 1939, she immediately shushes off the ski slopes of her posh finishing school in Switzerland, gets on a train back to England, and signs up for volunteer war service. She fancies herself in the role of a wartime spy, but instead is put in charge of a class of school children to fill in for male teachers called to active duty. This lasts for only a few days at which point the children are evacuated to the countryside and she is let go because she identifies a little too closely with her young pupils. In particular, she bonds with an American boy whose father is employed by a minstrel show at the London Lyceum, and this bond lasts throughout the novel.

Mary first views the war as an adventure, but is nearly done in by it. Her large family home in Pimlico survives seemingly untouched with its servants and staid butler, almost preserved like a relic from a vanished world. At the same time bombs almost continuously rain down on working class East London in what seems like a classist plot by the German bombers. There is a wonderful and unlikely long-distance romance that develops and survives the cruel twists that the war presents, joining two strands of the narrative.

UK cover

This novel is full of great prose, wonderful dialogue, exquisite historical detail, and particularly great insight into the London blitz and the siege of Malta, the latter about which I knew very little. There are just so many wonderful “bits” that will stay with you long after you put the book down.

Readalikes: A God in Ruins, All the Light We Cannot See

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Here we are / Graham Swift

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If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

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