Publisher: Hodder paperbacks
Publication date: 14 Augst 2014
ISBN: 9781444777451
First Line - "My Dear Dorothea"
Forgive me, Dorothea, for I cannot forgive you. What you do, to this child, to this child's mother, it is wrong...
Roberta likes to collect the letters and postcards she finds in second-hand books. When her father gives her some of her grandmother's belongings, she finds a baffling letter from the grandfather she never knew - dated after he supposedly died in the war.
Dorothy is unhappily married to Albert, who is away at war. When an aeroplane crashes in the field behind her house she meets Squadron Leader Jan Pietrykowski, and as their bond deepens she dares to hope she might find happiness. But fate has other plans for them both, and soon she is hiding a secret so momentous that its shockwaves will touch her granddaughter many years later...
This is a dual timeline story and I liked it quite a bit. Told in alternating parts from the point of view of Roberta, a thirty something single woman working in an independent bookshop in present times, and her grandmother Dorothy during the WWII.
I find with most dual time period books that I'm drawn to one era over the other and this was partially true with this one. I really liked Dorothy's sections set in the early 1940's. I liked Roberta's parts a bit too but really felt that it was secondary to the real story. There's a bit of mystery, tragedy, hopefulness, regret and at the heart of it a love story, of sorts. There's a lot of heartbreak here and it seems like a lot has been packed into less than 300 pages.
I would never have guessed that this was a debut book, it's very well written and I'll probably look out for more by this new author
*Note - I was sent a copy of this title by the publisher*
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