From three bestselling authors comes an interwoven tale about a trio of World War II nurses stationed in the South Pacific who wage their own battle for freedom and survival.
The Philippines, 1941. When U.S. Navy nurse Eleanor Lindstrom, U.S. Army nurse Penny Franklin, and Filipina nurse Lita Capel forge a friendship at the Army Navy Club in Manila, they believe they're living a paradise assignment. All three are seeking a way to escape their pasts, but soon the beauty and promise of their surroundings give way to the heavy mantle of war.
Caught in the crosshairs of a fight between the U.S. military and the Imperial Japanese Army for control of the Philippine Islands, the nurses are forced to serve under combat conditions and, ultimately, endure captivity as the first female prisoners of the Second World War. As their resiliency is tested in the face of squalid living arrangements, food shortages, and the enemy's blatant disregard for the articles of the Geneva Convention, the women strive to keep their hope- and their fellow inmates-alive, though not without great cost.
In this sweeping story based on the true experiences of nurses dubbed "the Angels of Bataan," three women shift in and out of each other's lives through the darkest days of the war, buoyed by their unwavering friendship and distant dreams of liberation.
"Three of the biggest powerhouses in historical fiction come together to pen this breathtaking story of three nurses serving in the Philippines during the Second World War." -PAM JENOFF, New York Times bestselling author of The Woman with the Blue Star
- World War II historical fiction
- Stand-alone novel
- Audiobook narrated by Saskia Maarleveld
- Also by authors: Code Name Hélène, The Ways We Hide, The Nature of Fragile Things
April 18, 1906: A massive earthquake rocks San Francisco just before daybreak, igniting a devouring inferno. Lives are lost, lives are shattered, but some rise from the ashes forever changed.
Sophie Whalen is a young Irish immigrant so desperate to get out of a New York tenement that she answers a mail-order bride ad and agrees to marry a man she knows nothing about. San Francisco widower Martin Hocking proves to be as aloof as he is mesmerizingly handsome. Sophie quickly develops deep affection for Kat, Martin's silent five-year-old daughter, but Martin's odd behavior leaves her with the uneasy feeling that something about her newfound situation isn't right.
Then one early-spring evening, a stranger at the door sets in motion a transforming chain of events. Sophie discovers hidden ties to two other women. The first, pretty and pregnant, is standing on her doorstep. The second is hundreds of miles away in the American Southwest, grieving the loss of everything she once loved.
The fates of these three women intertwine on the eve of the devastating earthquake, thrusting them onto a perilous journey that will test their resiliency and resolve and, ultimately, their belief that love can overcome fear.
From the acclaimed author of The Last Year of the War and As Bright as Heaven comes a gripping novel about the bonds of friendship and mother love, and the power of female solidarity.
From the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life and As Bright as Heaven comes a novel about a German American teenager whose life changes forever when her immigrant family is sent to an internment camp during World War II.
Elise Sontag is a typical Iowa fourteen-year-old in 1943-aware of the war but distanced from its reach. Then her father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer. The family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where, behind the armed guards and barbed wire, Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity.
The only thing that makes the camp bearable is meeting fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American teen from Los Angeles, whose friendship empowers Elise to believe the life she knew before the war will again be hers. Together in the desert wilderness, Elise and Mariko hold tight the dream of being young American women with a future beyond the fences.
But when the Sontag family is exchanged for American prisoners behind enemy lines in Germany, Elise will face head-on the person the war desires to make of her. In that devastating crucible she must discover if she has the will to rise above prejudice and hatred and re-claim her own destiny, or disappear into the image others have cast upon her.
The Last Year of the War tells a little-known story of World War II with great resonance for our own times and challenges the very notion of who we are when who we've always been is called into question.
From the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life and A Bridge Across the Ocean comes a new novel set in Philadelphia during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which tells the story of a family reborn through loss and love.
When her infant son dies, Pauline Bright no longer sees any reason to resist her husband's chance to inherit his uncle's prosperous business in Philadelphia. The Brights are poor tobacco farmers in the South, and their three remaining children-Evie, Maggie, and Willa-will have a better life in the city. The fact that the uncle is a mortician no longer seems to matter to Pauline.
But the Brights arrive in Philadelphia just months before the city is engulfed by the Spanish flu. More people die in Philadelphia than in any other American city, and the Brights are all forever changed by their encounter with it. Youngest Willa will grow up to be a child of the Jazz Age, constantly seeking pleasure in her refusal to recognize any more pain. Eldest Evie will become a doctor, not of the body, but one of the new doctors for the mind, in her quest to understand how one can survive such tragedies. But it is the middle child, Maggie, who follows in her mother's footsteps, and discovers that it is by embracing death that she can not only survive but also seize life.
Wartime intrigue spans the lives of three women—past and present—in the latest novel from the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life.
February, 1946. World War Two is over, but the recovery from the most intimate of its horrors has only just begun for Annaliese Lange, a German ballerina desperate to escape her past, and Simone Deveraux, the wronged daughter of a French Résistance spy.
Now the two women are joining hundreds of other European war brides aboard the renowned RMS Queen Mary to cross the Atlantic and be reunited with their American husbands. Their new lives in the United States brightly beckon until their tightly-held secrets are laid bare in their shared stateroom. When the voyage ends at New York Harbor, only one of them will disembark...
Present day. Facing a crossroads in her own life, Brette Caslake visits the famously haunted Queen Mary at the request of an old friend. What she finds will set her on a course to solve a seventy-year-old tragedy that will draw her into the heartaches and triumphs of the courageous war brides—and will ultimately lead her to reconsider what she has to sacrifice to achieve her own deepest longings.
CONVERSATION GUIDE INCLUDED
Readers of suspense fiction will once again be enthralled with the latest entry in the compelling series featuring attorney Rachael Flynn and her continuing cast of intriguing characters.
A newborn is found alive in a trash bin and a young, single mother insists her baby was abducted. While St. Paul police are skeptical, attorney Rachael Flynn's strange dreams lead her to believe the mother is telling the truth. But who would steal a baby only to leave it for dead?
When the baby disappears again, Rachael agonizes over her decision to allow the baby to be returned to his mother. Did she make a terrible mistake? And where is that missing baby? Who would wish the child harm? Rachael races to see past the deception that threatens to send a young mother to prison and a newborn to a terrible fate.
Critically acclaimed author Susan Meissner's Rachael Flynn mystery series started with the popularWidows and Orphans. In the second serving of intrigue, Sticks and Stones, lawyer Rachael Flynn receives an unsigned, heart-stopping letter:
They're going to find a body at the Prairie Bluff construction site. He deserved what he got, but it wasn't supposed to happen. It was an accident.
When the body is uncovered, Rachael and Detective Will Pendleton discover that the fifteen-year old victim, Randall Buckett, had been buried twenty-five years before. Is the letter writer and the killer the same person? Why would someone speak up now? And why are they telling Rachael?
Susan Meissner's ability to weave a fascinating tale will leave readers wanting more.
When attorney Rachael Flynn learns her bighearted younger brother has been arrested, she at first takes it in stride; Joshua has been in trouble before when his zeal for helping the downtrodden and disadvantaged pitted him against the law. But this time the charge is murder and he's confessed to the crime. Certain that he's innocent, Rachael begs Joshua to let her represent him, but her brother refuses her offer of counsel. As Rachael works on the case on her own, she begins to suspect that Josh knows who the real killer is, but she's unable to get him to cooperate with his defense. When Rachael asks her husband, Trace, and his fellow artist friends to sketch the scene of the crime as they see it, a new piece of the puzzle becomes apparent...a piece that ultimately leads to a much bigger truth.
"A powerful story of family and faith, wrapped in a mystery that touches the deep corners of the heart. Susan Meissner writes with a sure hand, and this book will make her many new fans." --James Scott Bell, bestselling author of Presumed Guilty
Here is the dramatic story of two young girls, Megan and Jen, who meet in first grade and quickly become inseparable friends.
Inseparable, that is, until one of them is snatched away by kidnappers as the other young girl watches helplessly.
The remaining child grows up with the haunting memory of her friend abduction...and absence from her life. Then, sixteen years later, the stunning truth of the disappearance
is revealed. And once again, lives are changed forever.
This wonderful and heartrending second novel endears the reader to every character in this intriguing story. A testament to God ability to work all things together for good. A smashing follow–up to the author well–received first novel,Whythe Sky Is Blue.
In this new novel from the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life, two women working in Hollywood during its Golden Age discover the joy and heartbreak of true friendship.
Los Angeles, Present Day. When an iconic hat worn by Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind ends up in Christine McAllister's vintage clothing boutique by mistake, her efforts to return it to its owner take her on a journey more enchanting than any classic movie...
Los Angeles, 1938. Violet Mayfield sets out to reinvent herself in Hollywood after her dream of becoming a wife and mother falls apart, and lands a job on the film-set of Gone With the Wind. There, she meets enigmatic Audrey Duvall, a once-rising film star who is now a fellow secretary. Audrey's zest for life and their adventures together among Hollywood's glitterati enthrall Violet...until each woman's deepest desires collide. What Audrey and Violet are willing to risk, for themselves and for each other, to ensure their own happy endings will shape their friendship, and their lives, far into the future.
What options does a Christian woman have after she's brutally assaulted by a stranger...and becomes pregnant? That's the heartrending situation Claire Holland faces. Happily married and the mother of two when she is attacked, Claire begins an incredible journey on the painful pathway to trusting God "in all things."
When Claire's husband, Dan, confesses he can't be a father to the expected child, Claire's decision to put the baby up for adoption creates a sense of tremendous loss for Claire. Later, unexpected circumstances turn this seeming loss into victory.
This wonderful first novel isn't a love story....but a life story, presenting the twin themes trusting God in tragic circumstances and reaping the rewards that eventually come with sacrificial loving.
A beautiful scarf, passed down through the generations, connects two women who learn that the weight of the world is made bearable by the love we give away....September 1911. On Ellis Island in New York Harbor, nurse Clara Wood cannot face returning to Manhattan, where the man she loved fell to his death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Then, while caring for a fevered immigrant whose own loss mirrors hers, she becomes intrigued by a name embroidered onto the scarf he carries and finds herself caught in a dilemma that compels her to confront the truth about the assumptions she's made. Will what she learns devastate her or free her? September 2011. On Manhattan's Upper West Side, widow Taryn Michaels has convinced herself that she is living fully, working in a charming specialty fabric store and raising her daughter alone. Then a long-lost photograph appears in a national magazine, and she is forced to relive the terrible day her husband died in the collapse of the World Trade Towers the same day a stranger reached out and saved her. Will a chance reconnection and a century-old scarf open Taryn's eyes to the larger forces at work in her life?
