My Longest Night

"So direct and unaffected that the mot juste is 'amateur' in the original sense of the one who embarks on a project motivated by love and conviction rather than for gain."—Los Angeles Times Fifty years have passed since the Normandy landing that began the liberation of France from Nazi occupation. This touching eyewitness account, told from the perspective of a twelve-year-old girl, has all the force and beauty of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. As the first wave of Allied paratroopers landed behind the lines in Normandy on the night of June 5, 1944, many fell into the flooded marshlands on either side of the railway line that ran between Paris and Cherbourg—virtually in the Duboscq family's backyard. Throughout that historic night, Geneviève and her father, a hard-drinking peasant named Papa Maurice, saved numerous Americans from drowning and gave them refuge while they regrouped for what was to become one of the most heroic battles of World War II.