Published on 11th August. Available in ebook, paperback, Kindle Unlimited, and audiobook.
Every page is shared in secret… and a single book could cost a life.
France, 1941. Margot locks her bookshop door and slips into the cellar, where a circle of brave women gather by candlelight to read the books the Germans are burning. They are risking everything to share forbidden stories and fight back. But one seat is empty… Esther is missing, and as a Jewish woman, she is in terrible danger. Whatever happens, Margot has promised to take care of Esther’s baby, darling Isabelle…
Present day. Lucy gasps as she descends into the cellar beneath the bookshop she has inherited from her grandmother. Wooden chairs are arranged in a circle, as if the resistance book club members have just vanished. A candle sits on a saucer; a book lies open.
Still grieving her grandmother, Lucy was left a letter about the wartime book club hinting at a devastating secret. And one book is wrapped in yellowed newspaper, addressed in faded ink to a woman named Esther. Does it contain a clue about the fate of the tiny baby hidden by the book club? What really happened on that dark night when one of its members taken by the Nazis?
And as she uncovers the bookshop’s past, will the truth force Lucy to rethink everything she thought she knew about her own family?
Did you know…?
Cordeval isn’t a real village, but is based on the many communities along the Normandy coast who lived through the hardships of the Occupation, only to be in the firing line come D-Day. The Liste Otto was a list of books banned by the Nazi regime, which considered them anti-German. Thousands of books were officially condemned as undesirable and removed from French shelves. Whilst the Nazi book burnings didn’t take place in France, Lauterborn’s bonfire of the condemned books reflects the burnings held in Germany in the 1930s.
The tunnels that run beneath Cordeval are partly based on legends of smuggler’s tunnels hidden below many fishing villages. And they’re partly inspired by the tunnels dug into the chalk beneath the northern French town of Arras. After playing an important role during the Great War, the tunnels served as air-raid shelters during the Second World War. But, in 1945, they were closed up and forgotten for decades.
