Tears of Amber

  “The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”—Aldous Huxley. Sofía Segovia, the bestselling author of The Murmur of Bees, has written another extraordinary historical novel, this time set in Eastern Europe during WWII. Tears of Amber is inspired by actual events—not only by official texts but also by the accounts of two children and their families who traveled enormous distances to survive one of the biggest exoduses in human history. The Nazi Party pushes eastward, reaching the […]

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The Ways We Hide

This wonderful novel maintained my interest from the first sentence. Unlike so many WWII novels I’ve read, The Ways We Hide one isn’t about the British who served as intelligence agents. it’s about an American woman’s involvement with MI9 (which I knew nothing about). MI9, the British Directorate of Military Intelligence Section 9, was a highly secret department of the War Office between 1939 and 1945. Their function was two-fold: to help Allied POWs escape Nazi Germany, and help downed airmen evade capture after being shot down. Fenna Vos grew up on Michigan’s harsh Upper Peninsula. On Christmas Eve, 1913, the union holds a party at the Italian Hall in […]

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