Synopsis:

Munich, 1938. Evelyn Brand is an American foreign correspondent as determined to prove her worth in a male-dominated profession as she is to expose the growing tyranny in Nazi Germany. To do so, she must walk a thin line. If she offends the government, she could be expelled from the country--or worse. If she fails to truthfully report on major stories, she'll never be able to give a voice to the oppressed--and wake up the folks back home.

In another part of the city, American graduate student Peter Lang is working on his PhD in German. Disillusioned with the chaos in the world due to the Great Depression, he is impressed with the prosperity and order of German society. But when the brutality of the regime hits close, he discovers a far better way to use his contacts within the Nazi party--to feed information to the shrewd reporter he can't get off his mind.

This electric standalone novel from fan-favorite Sarah Sundin puts you right at the intersection of pulse-pounding suspense and heart-stopping romance.

At the height of WWII, five idealistic young Americans receive a mysterious letter from the OSS, asking them if they are willing to fight for their country. The men and women from very different backgrounds--a Texan athlete with German roots, an upper-crust son of a French mother and a wealthy businessman, a dirt-poor Midwestern fly fisherman, an orphaned fashion designer, and a ravishingly beautiful female fencer -- all answer the call of duty, but each for a secret reason of his or her own. They bond immediately, in a group code-named Dragonfly.
Soon after their training, they are dropped behind enemy lines and take up their false identities, isolated from one another except for a secret drop-box, but in close contact with the powerful Nazi elite who have Paris under siege.

Thus begins a dramatic and riveting cat-and-mouse game, as the young Americans seek to stay under the radar until a fatal misstep leads to the capture and the firing-squad execution of one of their team. But...is everything as it seems, or is this one more elaborate act of spycraft?

Captivating storytelling

England, 1940.

Clare Childs knew life would change when she unexpectedly inherited the "Maggie Bright"--a noble fifty-two-foot yacht. In fact, she's counting on it. But the boat harbors secrets. When a stranger arrives, searching for documents hidden onboard, Clare is pulled into a Scotland Yard investigation that could shed light on Hitler's darkest schemes and prompt America to action.Across the Channel, Hitler's "Blitzkrieg" has the entire British army in retreat with little hope for rescue at the shallow beaches of Dunkirk. With time running out, Churchill recruits civilian watercraft to help. Hitler is attacking from land, air, and sea, and any boat that goes might not return. Yet Clare knows "Maggie Bright" must answer the call--piloted by an American who has refused to join the war effort until now and a detective with a very personal motive for exposing the truth.The fate of the war hinges on this rescue. While two men join the desperate fight, a nation prays for a miracle.

Character driven WWII romance

RueAnn Boggs meets Charles Tolliver, a handsome Brit with a secret job, and in the course of twenty-four hours, RueAnn is swept off her feet—seduced, wed, and then left by dashing Charlie, who hastily departs for an assignment in England. When weeks go by and she hears nothing from her new husband, RueAnn becomes determined to find out if she’s a wife in name only, and she travels to London for answers. But what she finds there is not at all what she expects…

Susan Blunt has spent her life staying put, retreating into her books while her vivacious twin sister, Sara, lives life to the fullest. The start of the war hasn’t stopped vibrant Sara from collecting a throng of beaus in uniform, including Paul Overdone, an RAF pilot heading for the front. When Sara pressures Susan into switching places and going to a dance with Paul, Susan reluctantly agrees. Little does Susan know that a single night is more than enough time to fall deeply in love with Paul—who returns her ardor, even though he thinks she is someone else…

When the Blitz begins and bombs start raining down on London, both RueAnn and Susan must find the strength and courage they never knew they had in order to survive. They form a friendship out of the city’s ashes, one that helps them weather the storm as they wait for news from the front—from the men they love, have lost, and hope desperately to find once more.

Set against the backdrop of a remarkable era, INTO THE STORM brilliantly explores relationships in wartime, when the passion shared in just one day could sustain love for a lifetime and the love borne of one night’s deception could become the truth that saves a life.

Fantastic war time details fused with light romance

Lt. Georgiana Taylor has everything she could want. A comfortable boyfriend back home, a loving family, and a challenging job as a flight nurse. But in July 1943, Georgie’s cozy life gets decidedly more complicated when she meets pharmacist Sgt. John Hutchinson. Hutch resents the lack of respect he gets as a noncommissioned serviceman and hates how the war keeps him from his fiancée. While Georgie and Hutch share a love of the starry night skies over Sicily, their lives back home are falling apart. Can they weather the hurt and betrayal? Or will the pressures of war destroy the fragile connection they’ve made?

With her signature attention to detail and her talent for bringing characters together, Sarah Sundin pens another exciting tale in her series featuring WWII flight nurses. Fans new and old will find in On Distant Shores the perfect combination of emotion, action, and romance.

A unique gem of a gut wrenching war story

(Originally published February 6th 2012 by Egmont Press )

I have two weeks. You'll shoot me at the end no matter what I do.

That's what you do to enemy agents. It's what we do to enemy agents. But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and cooperation is the easy way out. Possibly the only way out for a girl caught red-handed doing dirty work like mine — and I will do anything, anything, to avoid SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden interrogating me again.

He has said that I can have as much paper as I need. All I have to do is cough up everything I can remember about the British War Effort. And I'm going to. But the story of how I came to be here starts with my friend Maddie. She is the pilot who flew me into France — an Allied Invasion of Two.

We are a sensational team.

A bit of chilly suspense and sparkly romance in this quick read.

America's Heartland, 1946. World War II has ended, and everyone is pursuing peacetime's bright promise with fresh energy and hope. Newly-arrived in a small Wisconsin town, Christina Tucker now dares to chase her long-cherished dreams: put her wartime nursing skills to use and reconnect with country life. But helping a shell-shocked veteran recover soon tests her determination and disturbs town memories best left buried. She has no choice but to turn to her patient's seemingly-irresponsible brother, Tyler Sutter. A restless ex-soldier, Tyler can't believe this pretty ladylike nurse can heal his family. Yet as Christina begins to understand Tyler's own fears, the two grow close, then closer still-as a terrible secret sparks one man's violent, vengeful spree. With both the guilty and innocent alike in harm's way, Tyler and Christina must face all their fears . . . or never live to see the future.

Can be read as a stand-alone, makes me want to read the others!

Lt. Raymond Novak prefers the pulpit to the cockpit, but at least his stateside job training B-17 pilots allows him the luxury of a personal life. As he courts Helen Carlisle, a young war widow and mother who conceals her pain under a frenzy of volunteer work, the sparks of their romance set a fire that flings them both into peril. After Ray leaves to fly a combat mission at the peak of the air war over Europe, Helen takes a job in a dangerous munitions yard and confronts an even graver menace in her own home. Will they find the courage to face their challenges? And can their young love survive until blue skies return?

Filled with daring and romance, Blue Skies Tomorrow will capture readers' hearts.

Even if the six daughters, born between 1904 and 1920, of the charming, eccentric David, Lord Redesdale, and his wife Sydney had been quite ordinary women, the span of their lives - encompassing the most traumatic century in Britain's history - and the status to which they were born, would have have made their story a fascinating one. But Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Decca and Debo, were, and are, far from ordinary.


The Mitfords' unconventional childhood and adolescence, growing up in a rambling country manor, deprived of formal education and at the mercy of their father's titanic rages and obsessions, has long been immortalised in Nancy's masterly comedies of aristocratic manners, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. The girls' lives were the stuff of headlines. Nancy, the merciless tease turned brilliant, subversive novelist; Diana, the most beautiful woman of her generation, reviled for her abandonment of her gilded marriage and hated and imprisoned for her love of Oswald Mosely; rebellious Decca, who eloped at nineteen to the Spanish Civil War with Churchill's communist nephew and went on to become a ground-breaking civil rights campaigner; sweet Debo who became Duchess of Devonshire and chatelaine of Chatsworth; even feminine, domesticated Pamela, known as 'Woman', was enough of a Mitford to have John Betjman at her feet and her Raeburn stove painted blue to match her eyes. And at their dark heart, beloved but unstable Unity, in love with Hitler and obsessed with Nazism, who shot herself as war was declared.

In The Mitford Girls, Mary Lovell's extensive research traces the development of each of these remarkable women from the nursery to maturity, recording the terrible losses they suffered and the rifts that opened between them; uncovering often uncomfortable details of their politics and personalities and revealing the truth to be more complicated, but no less extraordinary than Nancy's fiction.

A tour de force that echoes modern classics like Suite Francaise and The Postmistress.


"Housekeeper or housewife?" the soldier asks Silvana as she and eight- year-old Aurek board the ship that will take them from Poland to England at the end of World War II. There her husband, Janusz, is already waiting for them at the little house at 22 Britannia Road. But the war has changed them all so utterly that they'll barely recognize one another when they are reunited. "Survivor," she answers.

Silvana and Aurek spent the war hiding in the forests of Poland. Wild, almost feral Aurek doesn't know how to tie his own shoes or sleep in a bed. Janusz is an Englishman now-determined to forget Poland, forget his own ghosts from the way, and begin a new life as a proper English family. But for Silvana, who cannot escape the painful memory of a shattering wartime act, forgetting is not a possibility.


One of the most searing debuts to come along in years, 22 Britannia Road

“And there’s a legend—she had only vague details—that all couples who are meant to marry are connected by an invisible silver cord which is wrapped around their ankles at birth, and in time the matchmaking gods pull those cords tighter and tighter and draw the couple slowly toward one another until they meet.” So says Miss Kate Begley, Matchmaker of Kenmare, the enigmatic woman Ben MacCarthy meets in the summer of 1943.

As World War II rages on, Ben remains haunted by the mysterious disappearance of his wife, the actress Venetia Kelly. Searching for purpose by collecting stories for the Irish Folklore Commission, he travels to a remote seaside cottage to profile the aforementioned Matchmaker of Kenmare.

Ben is immediately captivated by the forthright Miss Begley, who is remarkably self-assured in her instincts but provincial in her experience. Miss Begley is determined to see that Ben moves through his grief—and a powerful friendship is forged along the way.

But when Charles Miller, a striking American military intelligence officer, arrives on the scene, Miss Begley develops an intense infatuation and looks to make a match for herself. Miller needs a favor, but it will be dangerous. Under the cover of their neutrality as Irish citizens, Miss Begley and Ben travel to London and effectively operate as spies. As they are drawn more deeply and painfully into the conflict, both discover the perils of neutrality—in both love and war.

Steeped in colorful history, The Matchmaker of Kenmare is a stirring story of friendship and sacrifice. New York Times bestselling author Frank Delaney has written a lush and surprising novel, rich as myth, tense as a thriller, and like all grand tales—harrowing, sometimes hilarious, and heartbreaking.

I can't think of anyone who has not heard of Anne Frank or her diary that depicts the tragic story of the little girl who did not survive the holocaust. This is not another Anne Frank's Diary story, this is a memoir of a woman who met Anne Frank and her family during the horrors of Hitler's reign in Germany. This is the same woman who actually rescued the pages of the diary before it was trampled by the Germans when they were taken from their hiding place.

The woman who is nicknamed Miep briefly touches on her childhood of being adopted by a Dutch family out of her Austrian home due to malnourishment, though not a direct fault of her biological family. Miep writes of her growing up in the Dutch school and then when she later works in an office for Otto Frank. Otto Frank is the father of Margot and Anne Frank, and in 1940 the girls were 14 and 10 years old when Miep had already socialized with them for a few years. At this point, Hitler was Fuhrer of Germany for 6 years and his Nazi ways were beginning to strike more serious fears with onlookers. Miep mentions when England and France had declared war on Germany; while not deeply affected politically yet by these events, Miep explains how she had not hated another person as much as she had begun to hate Hitler then.

Miep details her personal life in this memoir, from her social life to advancing career in the growing office under Otto Frank and she writes in a casual tone of how she had reacted to the things going on around her. She realizes that the trouble in Germany has hit closer to home when her Austrian passport gets changed to a German passport complete with a Swastika stamp. Suddenly events turn for the worse with the increasing raids on the Jewish people, who had once found solace in the Netherlands, were now being pulled out of their homes and the streets and taken to Hitler's 'labor' camps. For years the war raged on, with the Jewish sympathisers being persecuted and tortured for information on the resistance. I was astonished and horrified as the story went on as to the treatment of all of the Dutch civilians.

For several years Miep helped to hide the Frank family in the upper floors of the office building of the company that Miep had worked at for Otto Frank. She then became a source of food, friendship, news and entertainment as two families and an eighth man were hidden in the cramped quarters. The scrounging for food became a daily struggle for Miep to procure for herself and those she helped to hide, but she did it without complaining. The details of the war via the information waves were slow to come and sometimes inaccurate but still there was little hope. Finally they hear of the Allies, that the British were coming, that America had joined the war and there was at last a glimmer of hope that perhaps Hitler would be stopped. But it did not impact the horrific way of living that the people had to survive, and my heart broke for them as Miep details simply the hardships she and her friends endured.

Otto Frank seems like a father figure to Miep and her husband, who was very calm, patient and exact with all things that occurred around him. I could feel the admiration Miep held for Otto. But Anne, how she affected Miep with her big saucer like round eyes, and how she probably haunted Miep every time she closed her own eyes. The bond the two had shared was palpable and heartbreaking; despite the age differences, Anne and Miep were close and had respect for each other, their choices of friends were limited due to their situation. Miep speaks of the little characteristics of Anne that continue to make her a real person to us today, and modestly yet powerfully she tells this story of how Miep survived the war, but others did not.

I learned about the ordeals the Dutch endured during the German Occupation, and I enjoyed looking at the pictures that were included of Miep, her friends and family, and Anne and the Frank family. I devoured this book even when my heart was breaking for Anne's family and yet I still wanted to know more of the compelling story. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in how one woman and her husband helped bring solace to many while risking their own lives to do so. Miep Gies was a wonderfully passionate woman, someone we can only hope to have on our side when sides needs to be chosen.

Miep Gies writes the afterword in this newly reissued edition, as she reaches her 100th birthday, where she also dispels some of the facts that had misconstrued previously through Anne Frank's Diary. She writes with conviction and authority, and anyone who wants to learn more about the personal ordeals of the Holocaust, and Anne Frank, this is an absolute must read. She has toured the world telling the story, although at times it seems she would rather not. She realizes that this is a story that needs to be told, over and over, lest we forget the personal horrors of one dictator.

I took Miep's advice and I have ordered "The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition" by Anne Frank. Although extremely sad, the story is still fascinating due to the nature of Anne Frank's personality, and the wonder of what was lost. Through Anne's diary, millions have felt her words and her story that should never be forgotten. And again, Miep has done the world a service by offering us her personal experiences with Anne, who is seen as one face of many who perished during the Holocaust.

Miep's official Website http://www.miepgies.nl/en/149.html