The Whispers of War

November 1, 2019
When Samantha's beloved grandmother Marie passes away, her will sends Samantha from her home in Chicago to London, where she learns of Marie's vivid life during World War II. Born in Munich, Marie met her two best friends, Nora and Hazel, at a British boarding school. Inseparable, the three women stay together long after graduation. As the secretary to the German Department at Royal Imperial University in London, Marie finds herself drawn to Neil Havitt, an ambitious graduate student eager to make his mark in politics via the Communist Party of Great Britain. Married but distraught over multiple miscarriages, Hazel has found meaningful work as a matchmaker. Nora works in the Air Raid Precautions Department of the Home Office, where she is privy to national secrets. And once Hitler invades Poland, those secrets include plans to intern German nationals. As events in Europe escalate, Kelly (The Light Over London, 2019) deftly threads harbingers of domestic danger into the friends' lives, first via radio and newspaper, then through suspicions of their associates, and finally converging on Marie. Hazel and Nora risk everything to keep Marie out of the internment camps, but Kelly has strewn villains in every corner: Once Neil drops Marie--how can he have a German girlfriend in this time of war?--can she trust that her visits to Communist Party meetings will remain secret? What of her dissolute cousin Henrik, who is eager to throw Marie out of the house? Will he turn her in to the authorities out of sheer spite? Nora and Hazel are not entirely safe either, especially when it turns out that Hazel set up a wealthy British widow with a German professor--a German professor who is now missing and presumed a Nazi sympathizer. Throughout, Kelly skillfully balances narratives from all three friends' perspectives, building parallels to Samantha's own budding romance with Nora's grandson. Women's friendship overcomes the villainy of war in this engaging historical fiction.

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December 1, 2019
Kelly's latest outing (after The Light Over London, 2019) movingly depicts the importance of female friendship in wartime. In 1939, school friends Marie, Hazel, and Nora are living and working in London as World War II looms, each with her own set of concerns. German-born Marie is alarmed by increasingly vocal calls for the internment of Germans living in Britain; Hazel, who works as a matchmaker, is skilled at her profession but increasingly unhappy in her own marriage; and Nora, a secretary for the Home Office, is frustrated by her male superiors' refusal to allow her to play a more significant role in the war effort. These plotlines all converge as it soon becomes clear that Marie's freedom is in jeopardy?and she will need her friends to help her evade internment. Rich with historical detail and anchored by an utterly convincing friendship at its heart, this should find a wide audience among historical-fiction fans, book clubs, and readers who enjoy stories of the important roles women play in one another's lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)