Demobilising troops

These Long Shadows is set between the surrenders of Germany and Japan. The British are technically still at war with the Japanese. However, that war ‘in the Far East’ (as they called the Pacific theatre) is far away from Europe, removed from daily life. The task of demobilising (standing down) many thousands of personnel needed for the war effort was daunting. It hadn’t been done particularly well after WWI, so the government was under pressure not to repeat those mistakes. The British armed forces developed a system to decide the order in which they would stand men and women down which took into account age and length of service. I relied heavily on Alan Allport’s Demobbed: Coming Home after the Second World War for details on the technical aspects of this and Julie Summers Stranger in the House for the social ones. In the end, Jonty received an early medical discharge…after everything I put him through, he deserved it.

Rationing in England after the Second World War

It seems impossible to believe, but food rationing actually got worse for the people of Britain after the war. This was because after the war, Britain had many more mouths to feed and no more loans from the US. In fact, the British had loans to repay. I don’t touch on the food rationing as much as I was planning to in this book (although I managed to work it into The Light Keeper’s Wife.) Fabric and textile rationing and repurposing was important. There are plenty of examples of underwear made from silk RAF escape maps in museums, and garments made from parachute silk in museums today. 

The ‘make do and mend’ philosophy was also very strong, even in Australia. This dress, on display at the Australian War Memorial, shows is of a wedding dress made entirely from lining material.

The Polish Air Force

I have been looking for a way to work the Polish Air Forces into a book and found it in the character of Jan Delovski. The Polish pilots of 303 Squadron were in exile, evacuated from their country when the Germans and Soviets invaded, first to France and then to Britain. They were thought inferior to British pilots and forced into extra training. In fact, they were highly skilled. They were only allowed to fly in the final stretch of the Battle of Britain. They took to the sky with fresh energy, talent and passion. Ultimately, these pilots were a deciding factor in defeating the Luftwaffe in that decisive battle. Sadly, because Poland was under Soviet control after the war (and the Soviet Union was the post-war enemy), these men were not allowed to march in any of the victory celebrations. 

Assisted passage to Australia

After the war, the Australian Government really did offer passage to Australia from England for ten pounds per adult. The idea was part of a mantra that Australia needed to ‘populate or perish’. The scheme stayed in place for decades. These migrants became (affectionately) known as Ten Pound Poms. The idea was floated towards the end of the war, but the first migrants didn’t arrive until 1947, due to disruption and delays.

Have you got any questions about the history in These Long Shadows? I love talking about the history behind the book, so feel free to reach out via the contact page and ask. 

Here are three things I loved

The moral conflict: Cilla and Lachlan are both essentially good characters to whom deception, disloyalty and duplicity do not come easily. Both are trapped in one way or another. Cilla has no love for the Nazis but cannot convince anyone of that. Lachlan has no desire to work with MI5, but has to face the string of moral compromises that his situation brings on. The complex layers of moral conflict within each of these characters are well drawn and compel the reader through the book for the first quarter.

The Scottish hero: Sigh. I do love a Scottish hero with red hair and a strong moral compass (I even wrote one as my hero in These Long Shadows, coming out in March!). Goodness is such an underrated quality hero, and Lachlan is a good man forced to help Cilla lie and sabotage the country he loves. Sundin hits all the right Scottish ‘beats’ from Hogmanay to Robbie Burns quotes…and when he wraps her in his plaid I almost swooned.

The black moment: The promise (and quite, frankly, joy) of a romance is a happily ever after so of course you expect that despite the obstacles to true love, everything will work out in the wash. However, I don’t think I’ve ever been as thoroughly convinced by a “black moment” in a romance story as I was by this one. I honestly didn’t think they were going to make it. To which I say, “Well played, Miss Sundin. Well played.”

Midnight on the Scottish Shore releases on 4 February 2025. Get it from Amazon US, Amazon Australia, or the usual bookish places. I was provided an advanced copy of Midnight on the Scottish Shore by Netgalley, but this didn’t influence my review.

The Truth Behind Bartondale

I chose the location for the Deroy estate when I was writing Heart in the Clouds and modeled the house of Belton Estate in Grantham. But the story that captured my imagination was that of Hughenden in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, once the country house of Victorian-era politician Benjamin Disraeli. Renamed “Hillside” during the war, the house was used as a place to make maps for RAF Bomber Command. The purpose of the work was so secret that it wasn’t until the 1990s, when a National Trust tour guide overheard a grandfather telling the story of his war work to his grandchildren, that the story became widely known.

While Grace’s home is inspired by Belton House near Grantham, the institution “Bartondale” is inspired by Hillside. I did borrow details from the accounts of people who worked there, including the idea that very few knew the entire story of the work. I also borrowed details from accounts of workers in other photographic intelligence units like RAF Medmenham (including the fact that they had both RAF and US Army personnel)  to create the world within Bartondale’s walls.

The Firestorm in Hamburg

Operation Gomorrah was the official name of the seven days and nights of bombings by Allied forces on the city of Hamburg in July 1943. This was a military victory for the Allies, more or less concluding the ‘Battle of the Ruhr’ that began with the operation over Essen after which Alec crash lands in Heart in the Clouds. As I mentioned in the book, everything went right for the Allies. From the new radar-jamming technology called window (literally aluminum foil strips dumped out the window of the aircraft) to coordinated nighttime bombings by the RAF and daylight bombings by the USAAF.

The results were devastating. Incendiary bombs caused a blaze that needed a new word to describe it: Firestorm. Around 40,000 Germans died, and hundreds and thousands of non-combatants were injured. But the raid crippled the industrial heartland of Germany.

My grandfather was part of this operation and it lived in his memory. I don’t think he thought he could ever be forgiven for his role in it, which was what I wanted to explore with Teddy’s character.

The Savoy Hotel

Ok, I just adore The Savoy, and any time I can get it into a book I will. It was one of Chruchill’s favourite wartime haunts and it really did pull out all the stops to cater to its exclusive clientele. The Savoy’s American Bar is the longest-running cocktail bar in the world. The famous 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, written by one-time head bartender Harry Craddock is still in print today. Head bartender Eddie Clarke really did invent a cocktail for each branch of the British armed forces during WWII, before joining the navy. I never found the recipes for the RAF cocktail called “Wings” but I reimagined it as the version of the aviation in the Savoy Cocktail Book which doesn’t have the creme de violette. Instead, the bartender drops in an inky food colouring … which may or may not be booze what with rations and all that!

Have you got any questions about the history in The Mapmaker’s Secret? I love talking about the history behind the book! So feel free to reach out via the contact page and ask. 

Three things I loved

The opening: The first chapter of this book is utterly gripping. The reader is dropped right in the middle of the action right next to Aleida as she tries to escape. We feel the full effect of her husband’s abusive behaviour and experience the shock and grief of discovering she is separated from her beloved son, all in the first gripping 1500 or so words.

This is the kind of scene that seals the deal in the bookshop because you know with a writer like Sarah Sundin if the first scene is this good the rest of the book will be brilliant.

A radio journalist hero: I might be biased here because my husband was a radio journalist when I met and married him! But Hugh is absolutely delightful. I liked the distinctions Sundin made between the deceitful nature of the charm of Aleida’s first husband and that of the charismatic Hugh. I adored the behind-the-scenes details of the BBC during wartime. The regular gatherings of journalists and correspondents at the Heart and Swan pub were some of my favourites.

An unexpected murder mystery: I loved the murder mystery storyline that bubbled away in the background and its gripping conclusion. The mystery and suspense elements were elegantly woven into what is primarily a love story, with plenty of twists and a satisfying climax.

Embers in the London Sky is available at Amazon US and Amazon Australia.

We meet twin sisters Helena and Antonina in 1939, as Warsaw teeters on the cusp of war, and fall headlong with them into the barbarism wrought on their city. Estranged from each other through misunderstanding, the sisters pursue resistance in their own ways––one is a people smuggler and one is a soldier––and through them we witness some of the most brutal parts of the German occupation. Sieges. Bombings. Doomed uprisings. Mass slaughters. 

Amanda’s skill is taking devastating details from historical accounts, and reweaving them into her narrative so that it feels like a first hand account. (Amanda’s historical notes at the end of the book highlight where and how she has done this.) As time marches steadily away from these events and the eyewitnesses to this history pass away, the importance of a novelist’s skill to recreate them with unflinching detail grows. 

This is not a light story (even the ending is tainted by the knowledge that Poland ultimately swapped a Nazi occupation for a Soviet one) but it pays great honour to the people of Poland. You will be thinking about it long after you have put it down.

Buy from Amazon US, Amazon Australia or find other links at Amanda’s website (where you can also read an excerpt).

Behind the pages: The Warsaw Sisters by Amanda Barratt

Tell us a bit about who you are and how you write?

What is your book about? 

Why this story and why now?

Though the Second World War has been written about extensively, Poland’s wartime history remains relatively unknown, especially in North America. In the midst of one of the most brutal occupation regimes faced by any European country during the war, extraordinary resistance was born. As I researched the women who risked their lives to rescue Jewish children and the women who suffered and sacrificed as soldiers during the Warsaw Uprising, their dauntless courage left me in awe and their stories begged to be explored through a narrative format.

Where did you go to research this story?

Tell us a story you came across in research that didn’t make it into the book.

Is there a WWII book that you would like to peek behind the pages of? It can be fiction or non-fiction. Feel free to send your suggestion to me via the contact page. 

Behind the pages: The Bravest Soldiers by Elaine Schroller

Tell us a bit about who you are and how you write?

I was a long-time technical writer who read historical fiction and mysteries to escape to other places and times. At a certain point I wondered whether I could write too! I became fascinated by the historical and cultural relationships between Australia, France, and the US during WWI and WWII and simply had to explore the possibilities!

What is your book about?

Set in Sydney, Australia, The Bravest Soldiers is about how two women, one a mother who experienced WWI as a nurse in France and the other a daughter who was conceived during WWI and grew up amid its ruins, cope (or not in some cases) when WWII separates them from people they love. In the course of following their personal and emotional journeys, I’ve written how the Australian home front dealt with the effects of a threat of invasion by the Japanese and a very real invasion by hundreds of thousands of US service personnel, most of whom had never been more than fifty miles from home!

Why this story and why now?

While writing my debut novel Dare Not Tell, which does a deep dive into the long-term effects of WWI on an Australian soldier and an American nurse, I knew I wanted to continue their stories and explore how WWII would affect them. Despite a glut of WWII novels that were published in and around 2020, I had to tell the story I’d dreamed up! Luckily, Australia and the Pacific are less well-known venues than those set in Europe involving the French and Nazis.

Where did you go to research this story?

Abroad, I spent eight days in Sydney, visiting numerous museums, churches, memorials, and suburbs, plus two days in the Blue Mountains, to place the characters firmly where I wanted them on the home front – sitting next to the bronze soldier memorial in St. Mary’s cathedral, standing at what is now the Dudley Page Reserve in Dover Heights and taking in the ocean and harbor views, trying to compare everything I saw in 2019 with photos of 1940s Sydney. I also drew upon several trips to France (including the Somme battlefields and the Australian National Memorial in Villers-Bretonneux) and living in Lebanon for the locations outside Australia and the sphere of the South West Pacific Area.

At home in Bellaire, Texas, I read dozens of WWII-era novels by Australian authors, including the classics Come In Spinner by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James and Climate of Courage by Jon Cleary, multiple academic publications, and spent innumerable hours on the Australian War Memorial and Trove/Sydney Morning Herald websites. 

Tell us a story you came across in research that didn’t make it into the book.

One of the Australian ladies I interviewed worked as a WAAF assigned to General Douglas McArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane. She was twenty-ish at the time and desperate to escape the confines of conventional female plus family expectations and participate in the war effort. I wanted to include her and her experiences but simply couldn’t find a way to work her in except as a brief mention as the sister of one of the secondary characters.

Is there a WWII book that you would like to peek behind the pages of? It can be fiction or non-fiction. Feel free to send your suggestion to me via the contact page. 

The Bomber Command Memorial at Green Park in London.

RAF Bomber Command

On August 20, 1940 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a famous speech to the House of Commons where he remarked on the bravery of the Royal Air Force and the resilience of the British people. The most famous line from this speech is

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Churchill was talking about the fighter pilots who fought off the Luftwaffe during the battle of Britain. Without air superiority, the German army could not launch their planned invasion of Britain. Many people forget the words Churchill spoke next. 

“We must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power. On no part of the Royal Air Force does the weight of the war fall more heavily than on the bombers.”

This was the job of Bomber Command. It was relentless, brutal and dangerous. Just under 50% of the men who flew with Bomber Command died. Despite their bravery, their work was downplayed after the war. Once the total cost of the war was counted, the military strategy of area bombing had inflicted devastating numbers of casualties across Europe. 

War is always terrible. In Heart in the Clouds I don’t mean to celebrate their destructive work, vital as it was to defeating the Nazis. I mean to illuminate it. To take the reader inside a Bomber Command station, inside an Avro Lancaster, and inside the head of a pilot grappling with meaning in what he does each night.

RAAF 467 Squadron

Although Alec and his crew are of my own making, their squadron was real. It was formed in November 1942 and disbanded in 1945, so this number represents a very specific time in history. Under Royal Australian Air Force control, the squadron featured airmen from Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth, including New Zealand and Canada.

RAAF pilots with Bomber Command in WWII had to fly thirty operations to complete their flying tour. In Heart in the Clouds, Alec is counting down the operations until he finishes his tour. But, he eventually agrees to do another tour and is selected for Squadron X. History buffs will know that the famous 617 “Dambusters” Squadron was formed so hastily it didn’t have a number and was originally called Squadron X. All of the characters in Heart in the Clouds are imaginary, except for Wing Commander Guy Gibson, whom Alec travels to RAF Scampton to meet.

The Air Transport Auxiliary

Eagle-eyed readers may notice an historical inaccuracy in the form of Birdie Bates, the ATA pilot who gives Maggie the advice to let Alec “reap the whirlwind”. Birdie is one of my favourite creations. In fact, she is the heroine in a story I have out on submission! (Easter Egg: those of you who paid very close attention in Finishing School might realise that Birdie Bates and Grace Deroy were Amy Snee’s debating team-mates at school.)

Although women did fly with the ATA and 11 of those women were licensed to fly Lancasters at the end of the war, they didn’t start flying that aircraft until 1944. However, I just couldn’t resist having Birdie fly onto the scene in one, even though it was 1942. Apologies to the purists.

Have you got any questions about the history in Heart in the Clouds? I love talking about the history behind the book! So feel free to reach out via the contact page and ask. 

The Sound of Light

The Sound of Light is set in World War II Denmark. In the opening pages, as the Germans invade Denmark, our hero Baron Henrik Ahlfeldt has to make a desperate choice. Does he flee to Sweden, or does he go into hiding, concealing his aristocratic identity so he can put his skills as an Olympic rowers to use, couriering information across the sound between Sweden and Denmark?

The action quickly moves to 1943 where we meet Dr Else Jensen, a Danish-American physicist working at the Institute headed by Niels Bohr (a real life character Sundin worked into her story). While Else makes her own choices that defy the Nazis, she is unaware that her quiet, seemingly uneducated neighbour at her boarding house, Hemming Anderson, is actually Henrik. In the intervening years, he has become known as the Hauman (The Merman) for his critical resistance work. The romance unfolds achingly slowly as these two characters come to know, understand and then love each other with all the secrets and complications that working with the resistance naturally throws up.

Three things I loved

Normally, I try to write reviews where I focus on three things I love about a book. In the case of The Sound of Light, it’s hard to narrow it down to just three! However, I tried.

1) The Danish setting: Like the Ocracoke islands in Roseanna White’s Yesterday’s Tides, WWII Denmark is not a setting I know much about. Sarah makes it come to life. As always, her author’s note at the end shed light on the facts behind the fiction. I was interested to learn that, though occupied by the Nazis, the Danish people at first enjoyed freedoms that other occupied nations didn’t. Of course, that didn’t last but as the events of the story unfolded, I was moved by the courage of the Danish people who rose up to protect their Jewish communities.

2) Gritty reality: As I mentioned when I reviewed Within These Walls of Sorrow, life is harrowing and I don’t need my reading to be. But that doesn’t mean I want my reading to be all rainbows and unicorns! I appreciate Sarah’s deft hand when writing the grittier elements of this story (spoiler: the hero is tortured), so that they never dwell in depravity. Instead they add to the journey of the character and ultimately add depth to the romance. 

3) Henrik and Else: The protagonists in this story are memorable. I thought about them long after I had finished the book. I loved Henrik’s complexity, his nobility, and the delicate way their love developed. And I loved that Else was a physicist (Women in STEM for the Win!)

You can get this book on Amazon US, Amazon Australia or visit Sarah’s Website for more. I also loved hearing the Danish pronunciations in audiobook narration, which you can get on Audible as I did or wherever you get good audiobooks!

Reviews of other books in this series:

• When Twilight Breaks 
• Until Leaves Fall in Paris

Within These Walls of Sorrow

Within These Walls of Sorrow is about the Apteka Pod Orlem – a pharmacy operated by Poles who wouldn’t abandon their premises in the heart of the Krakow ghetto, choosing instead to risk their lives to serve those within the ghetto walls. Based on a true story, the characters are fictional amalgamations of real people. We see the world through the eyes of a pharmacist, Zosia Lewendowska, and her young Jewish neighbour, who grows into a young woman during the story. We meet the characters in 1938 and stay with them for the next seven years. Seven brutal years.

Like in her book The White Rose Resists, Amanda puts you in the shoes of a witness to history. Readers experience the same shock, disbelief and anger as Zosia, as she witnesses these events and makes heart-rending decisions about how she can best help in the face of the countless atrocities she sees. We experience the hopelessness of Jewish girl Hania Silberman, who’s youth is disrupted by the Nazi occupation and gradually disintegrates as she experiences the organised, yet still somehow arbitrary, cruelty and violence of Nazi hatred for her people.

The subject matter is sometimes difficult to get through, as it should be. These times are hard to write about, but Amanda laces courage, resistance, resilience and redemption throughout the book, proving herself a master. Her research is thorough and meticulous, so as a reader I trust her to honour the Jewish experience while telling a little-known story of Polish resistance.

The story asks tough questions. Primarily, as a person of faith, Jew or Christian, how do you understand the world when the Creator God appears to have looked away from it? How should you respond when brutality and evil infects the whole of your society?  Ultimately Zosia’s motif, a saying of her dead husband murdered by the Nazis at the beginning of the occupation, answers:

“There is evil and there is good and there is a space between. We are given free will to choose where we stand. Evil thrives when good men choose the space between.”

This unflinching book will linger with you for days afterwards. Buy from Amazon US, Amazon Australia or find other links at Amanda’s website (where you can also read an excerpt).