We shall not sleep by Anne Perry

Find this book at your library

Read more reviews at NoveList

Genre - Mystery


This is the final novel in Perry’s WWI series. Chaplain Joseph Reavley must find out who murdered Nurse Sarah Price at a Casualty Clearing Station in France in the last weeks of the war. The possible suspects include wounded soldiers, medical staff & German prisoners. One of the German prisoners, Schenckendorff, is a vital witness in the plot that Joseph & his brother Matthew, an intelligence officer, have been trying to foil throughout the war. When Schenckendorff is arrested for Sarah Price’s murder, the Reavleys must find the real killer & get Schenckendorff to London before the Armistice is signed. As this is the end of a long series, all the strands of a complex plot must be resolved. Joseph & Matthew, along with their sisters, Judith & Hannah, have been searching for the man they call the Peacemaker, a traitor to Britain’s war effort, who has murdered many people, including their parents. The Reavleys must also find a way to deal with the traumas & grief they’ve suffered & look towards the future.

---- Reviewed by Lyn, Headquarters

Resistance by Agnes Humbert

Find this book at your library

Read more reviews at NoveList

Genre - Non Fiction

Agnes Humbert was an art historian living in Paris when the Germans invaded in 1940. She immediately became part of a group which spread anti-Nazi propaganda throughout occupied France through newsletters called Resistance. The title of the newsletter, Resistance, became the name of all the groups opposing the occupation. Agnes’ group was quickly betrayed & Agnes was arrested & sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for distributing propaganda. This book was written using the diary she kept until her arrest & her memories of her trial & deportation to a German labour camp. Agnes was forced to work in German factories in shocking conditions as slave labour. Slave workers were forced to do the most dangerous jobs such as weaving nylon without any protective clothing. Their hands were continually burnt by acid & they were considered unworthy to receive medical attention or adequate food. Agnes fought back by sabotaging her work so as to make the nylon useless or the wooden boxes she made in another factory fall apart because she cut short the nails she was given. After the Americans liberated the camp in 1945, Agnes began organizing supplies for the refugees pouring into Germany & collecting evidence to prosecute the Nazis. This remarkable book is a testimony to the strength of Agnes Humbert. She never loses her sense of humour, or her sense of outrage at the fate of her country & her determination to survive.

---- Reviewed by Lyn, Headquarters

The guernsey literary and potato peel pie society by Mary Ann Shaffer

Find this book at your library

Read more reviews at NoveList




This remarkable book is an epistolary novel, a style which went out of fashion around the time of Jane Austen. It consists of letters written in 1946 by Juliet Ashton, a writer living in London, her friends & the members of a literary society on Guernsey. Dawsey Adams has bought a book which Juliet once owned, and has written to the address in the front cover to tell her how much he enjoyed it. The book was the essays of Charles Lamb, and this starts a correspondence which changes Juliet's life. She hears about the formation of the Literary Society during the German occupation of the Channel Islands in WWII, learns what a potato peel pie is, & learns of the harsh conditions of life for the islanders, who were completely cut off from the world & relied on their German captors for news, food, & life itself. I smiled with recognition, laughed & cried. The book is full of the love of books & reading, friendship, & tells a relatively unknown story of WWII. The author worked on the book for many years, and sadly died just before it was published. This is a unique reading experience.

---- Reviewed by Lyn, Headquarters

Alfred & Emily by Doris Lessing

Find this book at your library

Read more reviews at NoveList




This is an interesting mix of fiction & non fiction. The first half is a fictional idea of what the lives of Lessing's parents (the Alfred & Emily of the title) could have been like if they hadn't married, and if WWI hadn’t disrupted their lives. They meet, but marry other people and are fulfilled in different ways. Lessing feels that WWI blighted their lives, and had an effect on her own life as well. “That war, the Great War…squatted over my childhood…And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.” Her father lost his leg & met her mother when she was nursing at the Royal Free Hospital. They emigrated to Rhodesia, but it wasn't a great success. Alfred really wanted to be an English farmer in Surrey & Emily's great love was killed in the war, and her life after that was really only second best & full of regrets. The second half of the book is a memoir of Alfred & Emily’s real lives. Lessing has written about her African childhood before, in her autobiographies & the Martha Quest series of novels. Here, though, she focuses more on her parents’ experiences of struggle & hardship, & the result is a moving account of two people who could have been happier if world events had left them untouched.

---- Reviewed by Lyn, Headquarters

Resistance by Owen Sheers

Find this book at your library

Read more reviews at NoveList




The women of a remote Welsh valley wake up one morning in 1944 and discover that their husbands have left their farms in the night. The German Army has invaded Britain and the men have been recruited for a guerilla resistance force to impede the enemy’s progress. A German patrol, led by Albrecht Wolfram, is sent to the valley by the SS to retrieve an ancient map hidden there. The soldiers are exhausted, and, when the tide of war moves on, and they are forgotten, they are content to wait for further instructions. Gradually, the women, led by Sarah Lewis and Maggie Jones, come to an accommodation with the Germans. They work together over a harsh winter to keep the farms going, and become wary friends. But the outside world must intrude and the idyll will end. This is a beautifully written first novel by a writer well-known for his poetry. The plot could have become a cliché, but Sheers avoids this, while creating a plausible picture of an alternative history of Europe.

---- Reviewed by Lyn, Headquarters

People of the book by Geraldine Brooks

Find this book at your library

Read more reviews at NoveList


Hanna Heath is a book conservator working in Sydney. She receives an urgent phone call asking her to go to war torn Sarajevo to work on a rare and beautiful haggadah, a medieval Jewish prayer book. Hanna’s journey to Sarajevo and her discoveries about the manuscript alternate with chapters about the history of the book. When Hanna finds a butterfly’s wing trapped in the pages, or wine and blood stains, we’re taken back to 1890’s Vienna or 17th century Venice, to discover what happened. Hanna also has to deal with her less than satisfactory personal life, her fraught relationship with her mother, and the tentative relationship she develops with Ozren, the young librarian who is the manuscript’s latest saviour.

---- Reviewed by Lyn, Headquarters