The Lost Lights of St Kilda by Elisabeth Gifford

Elisabeth Gifford's new historical novel flips between 1920s St Kilda - a very remote group of Scottish Islands - and the war-torn France of 1940. Fred is a POW in appalling conditions, which has him dreaming about the girl he left behind a dozen years before. He's spent the intervening years working around the world as a geologist, but now it seems imperative for him to get back to Scotland to find Chrissie, the young woman he met on St Kilda where he spent a summer.

Chrissie belongs to one of the small number of families eking out a life on Hirta, the largest St Kilda island. While they have some crops and livestock, much of the inhabitants' livelihood comes from the seabirds that live on the cliffs. Island men daringly abseil from giddying heights - no safety harnesses here - to collect fulmar chicks for their oil and meat. Day trippers in the summer take the boat to visit "the last hunter-gatherers in Great Britain" and shop for island handcrafts.

Into this forgotten world Fred arrives to study rock formations with his friend, the dashingly handsome and trouble-making Archie Mcleod. Archie is the laird's son and fellow student who had caught the eye of Chrissie as a young girl. The story describes Fred's settling in and we discover the island through his eyes as well as the problem he has falling for someone from a completely different way of life.

Woven through this love-against-the-odds story is Fred's escape with a fellow soldier, their help from ordinary folk and the French Resistance, their nail-biting journey across the Pyrenees to Spain. It's an engrossing story with wonderful characters, tangled emotions set at a time of social and political upheaval. And while Fred's escape story had me on the edge of my seat, it was the descriptions of St Kilda that had me particularly captivated. Really and truly, this is a lost world.

The Lost Lights of St Kilda is a terrific read. I had previously enjoyed other books by this author, particularly Secrets of the Sea House (set on the Isle of Skye), but I think this the best so far. She has a knack for creating memorable characters - ordinary people often in extraordinary situations. A great book for historical fiction fans.

Posted by JAM

Catalogue link: The Lost Lights of St Kilda

The Spies of Shilling Lane by Jennifer Ryan

The Spies of Shilling Lane introduces an unlikely heroine, fifty-year-old Mrs Braithwaite. Recently divorced, she’s alone and nobody likes her very much. She’s just too bossy and snooty – all of which means everyone’s happy to take her down a peg or two at the Ashcombe Women’s Voluntary Service.

With nothing to keep her at home, Mrs B heads to London to reconnect with her twenty-year-old daughter who abandoned the safety of the country for blitz-torn London. It’s 1941 and Mrs B is having doubts about what makes a successful life. She has written in her notebook that it’s something to do with social standing and how the world sees you, but she’s beginning to reconsider. Perhaps if she’d been a more sympathetic mother, she and Betty would be better friends.

Desperate to talk to Betty, Mrs B is disappointed when the timid, mousey landlord, Mr Norris, reveals that he hasn’t seen Betty for days, while nobody’s heard of her at the sewage works that supposedly employed her. Letters in Betty’s room reveal a secret life her mother could never have guessed at.

As bombs rain down by night, Mrs B and a reluctant Mr Norris become swept up in a plan to rescue Betty and to uncover goings on at a Nazi spy ring. While Mr Norris discovers an inner strength he didn’t know he possessed, Mrs B becomes a new person as well.

Jennifer Ryan (The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir) has returned to the wartime era and a new story of unlikely heroes and heroines, with a cast of quirky and original characters and a few plot twists along the way. While a gentle humour runs through the book, there’s also a strong emotional thread and the unwavering threat of invasion brings out the best and worst in everybody.

The Spies of Shilling Lane is a fun, light-hearted war story, if such a thing is possible, and leaves you wondering if Ryan might put the indomitable Mrs Braithwaite into a new adventure sometime soon. I hope so.

Posted by JAM

Catalogue link: The Spies of Shilling Lane

The Heart of the Ritz by Luke Devenish

I didn’t immediately engage with this historical fiction, but that may have had something to do with it being the first few days of level 4 lockdown in the Covid-19 national emergency.

The Heart of the Ritz is a story about the resistance movement and the occupation of Paris; beginning in 1940 and ending four years later with its liberation. The novel follows the people who live in the Hotel Ritz; the families, the high ranking Germans, the collaborators, the resistance fighters, the Jews, the women with secrets to hide and people to protect, and it is also about love.

Polly is a 16 year old orphan at the beginning of this story, and is being sent from Australia to live with her Aunt Marjorie in Paris after her Father dies. When her aunt dies suddenly the guardianship of Polly is handed over to Marjorie’s three friends: Comtesse Alexandrine, a converted Jew; Zita, a film star; and Lana Mae, a rich American. They take Polly to live with them in the palatial Hotel Ritz. All are keeping secrets from Polly about themselves and Marjorie. When the Nazis invade Paris and take over most of the Hotel Ritz the four women’s lives are changed as they adapt to sharing a room in the hotel and learn to interact with the high ranking Germans. Polly befriends Tommy, a Hungarian Jew, and illegitimate son of Alexandrine’s husband. Tommy is being hidden as a bar attendant at the Ritz by Alexandrine, to try to keep him safe. Together Tommy and Polly, with the help of a blind girl Odile, start quietly taking action against the occupiers. They call themselves the freedom volunteers. Overtime their escalating and more daring missions come to the notice of the Gestapo, suspicions and accusations are beginning to surface. Innocent people are being taken away, never to be seen again. As the Nazis and French police begin rounding up Jews, the guardians take action to protect the ones they love.

The story builds to dramatic acts of resistance and courage, as more resistance operators at the hotel are revealed. Collaborators and spies for the Nazis show their true colours. Alexandrine, Lana Mae, Zita and Marjorie’s secrets are told. The story finally ends with the liberation of France and the Hotel Ritz.

At the end of the book, the author Luke Devenish tells us The Heart of the Ritz was based on real life events. The characters in this story were based on people who showed courage, resilience and sacrifice for the greater freedom of France.

At the beginning of this novel, I compared the occupation to our own lockdown with queuing for food, and restrictions of movement. I was wrong, the occupation and reality of war in France far outweighed anything we are enduring. We are being kept safe, while they were never safe.

The Heart of the Ritz is an enjoyable read for lovers of historical fiction. Score 3.75 out of 5.

Reviewed by Lynette 

Catalogue link:  The Heart of the Ritz

Two Slices of Bread by Ingrid Coles

(My Nana is the writer of this memoir.)

That being said it is both a familiar read, having grown up with  begging her for stories about her life, leaning over her shoulder as she crafted this book back when it was a mass of word documents; and yet an also somewhat new and unknown experience.

Some of the perspectives written, particularly in the POW camp, are collections of memoirs, and stories from other family members, that Nana gathered. I love the way they come together, to shape her own personal journey. Though in the camp, she was barely old enough to craft a steady memory to look back on, her own feelings and emotions seep through in the retelling of her other family members and friends, that contributed to help her write the story.

She is able to look back on that part of her life with a great sense of healing, and having moved forth, while also connecting deeply in her writing to the trauma and fear that the war had on her as a young girl.

It is a potent and painful reminder that war lingers, long after fighting is declared finished. This is seen in Nana's Mother's health declining drastically, in part at least from the repercussions of war. In the community embracing Nana and her family when they came back to Holland, and in the way the war forced her to grow up far quicker than her years.

She also depicts the isolation of immigrating alone, at 16 years old to NZ, and studying nursing with very little knowledge of the English language, as effortlessly as if it happened a year ago.
I find her ability to recall conversations and small, impacting moments, helped to relay this as her story- her journey- rather than a blanket retelling of a moment in history.

Because I was able to connect to the story, in a way that was personal to Nana, I found myself quite emotionally impacted in a way I hadn't been by her story before.

I found myself imagining being in her shoes, which as her granddaughter was a very incredible thing to do. It gave me a new kind of perspective, personally and historically, to how life has changed since the war finished, and the way life goes on, after. Now, an experience marked as a history, to my generation. A history, we couldn't begin to fathom in our changed lives today.

Family connections aside~ I would recommend this to anyone wanting to gain perspective of life in POW camps, but especially the impacts of wars, to individuals and communities, long after they are declared finished. The often life-long impacts, that take multitudes to come out the other side of, and navigate a sense of ongoing freedom; a kind of new life.

And to any who has battled the absence of faith and hope, in humanity, this story is a testament to finding it, and finding it again.

That in war and loss, faith can be found, and clung to. To help rebuild a life, that lives on.

Reviewed by Lily

Catalogue link :  Two Slices of Bread