The Lost Girls of Paris
by Pam Jenoff
Come in and take a look at this historical fiction, releasing January 29, 2019. An excerpt is below so you can get a taste and then run to preorder 😉 Thank you to TLC Book Tours for this opportunity.
Publisher: Park Row
Publish Date: January 29, 2019
Paperback
384 Pages
Standalone
Genre: Historical Fiction
1946, Manhattan
Grace Healey is rebuilding her life after losing her husband during the war. One morning while passing through Grand Central Terminal on her way to work, she finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. Unable to resist her own curiosity, Grace opens the suitcase, where she discovers a dozen photographs—each of a different woman. In a moment of impulse, Grace takes the photographs and quickly leaves the station.
Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a ring of female secret agents who were deployed out of London during the war. Twelve of these women were sent to Occupied Europe as couriers and radio operators to aid the resistance, but they never returned home, their fates a mystery. Setting out to learn the truth behind the women in the photographs, Grace finds herself drawn to a young mother turned agent named Marie, whose daring mission overseas reveals a remarkable story of friendship, valor and betrayal.
Vividly rendered and inspired by true events, New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff shines a light on the incredible heroics of the brave women of the war, and weaves a mesmerizing tale of courage, sisterhood and the great strength of women to survive in the hardest of circumstances.
Pam is the author of several novels, including her most recent The Orphan's Tale, an instant New York Times bestseller. Pam was born in Maryland and raised outside Philadelphia. She attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge University in England. Upon receiving her master’s in history from Cambridge, she accepted an appointment as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army. The position provided a unique opportunity to witness and participate in operations at the most senior levels of government, including helping the families of the Pan Am Flight 103 victims secure their memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, observing recovery efforts at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing and attending ceremonies to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of World War II at sites such as Bastogne and Corregidor.
Following her work at the Pentagon, Jenoff moved to the State Department. In 1996 she was assigned to the U.S. Consulate in Krakow, Poland. It was during this period that Pam developed her expertise in Polish-Jewish relations and the Holocaust. Working on matters such as preservation of Auschwitz and the restitution of Jewish property in Poland, Jenoff developed close relations with the surviving Jewish community.
Having left the Foreign Service in 1998 to attend law school at the University of Pennsylvania, Jenoff is now employed as an attorney in Philadelphia.
Pam is the author of The Kommandant's Girl, which was an international bestseller and nominated for a Quill award, as well as The Diplomat's Wife and Almost Home.
EXCERPT
Chapter Three
Marie
London, 1943
The last place Marie would
have expected to be recruited as a secret agent (if indeed she could have
anticipated it at all) was in the loo.
An hour earlier, Marie
sat at a table by the window in the Town House, a quiet café on York Street she
had come to frequent, savoring a few minutes of quiet after a day of endless
clacking at the dingy War Office annex where she had taken a position as a
typist. She thought of the coming weekend, just two days off, and smiled, imagining
five-year-old Tess and the crooked tooth that surely would have come in a bit
more by now. That was the thing about only seeing her daughter at the
weekend—Marie seemed to miss years in the days in between. She wanted to be out
in the country with Tess, playing by the brook and digging for stones. But
someone had to stay here and make a few pounds in order to keep their aging row
home in Maida Vale from falling into foreclosure or disrepair, assuming the
bombs didn’t take it all first.
There was a booming
noise in the distance, causing the dishes on the table to rattle. Marie
started, reaching instinctively for the gas mask that no one carried anymore
since the Blitz had ended. She lifted her gaze to the plate glass window of the
café. Outside the rain-soaked street, a boy of no more than eight or nine was
trying to scrape up bits of coal from the pavement. Her stomach ached. Where
was his mother?
She remembered the day
more than two years ago that she’d decided to send Tess away. At first, the
notion of being separated from her daughter was almost unthinkable. Then a bomb
had hit the flats across the street, killing seven children. But for the grace
of God, that might have been Tess. The next morning, Marie began making
arrangements.
At least Tess was with
Aunt Hazel. The woman was more of a cousin and a bit dour to be sure, but was
nevertheless fond of the little girl. And Tess loved the old vicarage in East
Anglia with its endless cupboards and musty crawl spaces. She could run wild
across the fens when the weather permitted, and help Hazel with her work at the
post office when it did not. Marie couldn’t imagine putting her girl on a train
to be sent off to the countryside to a cold convent or God-knows-where-else,
into the arms of strangers. She had seen it at King’s Cross almost every Friday
last year as she made her way north to visit Tess—mothers batting back tears as
they adjusted coats and scarves on the little ones, younger siblings clinging
to older, children with too-large suitcases crying openly, trying to escape
through the carriage windows. It made the two-hour journey until she could
reach Tess and wrap her arms around her almost unbearable. She stayed each
Sunday until Hazel reminded her that she had best take the last train or miss
curfew. Her daughter was safe and well and with family. But that didn’t make
the fact that it was only Wednesday any more bearable.
Should she have brought
Tess back already? That was the question that had dogged Marie these past few
months as she had seen the trickle of children coming back to the city. the
Blitz was long over and there was a kind of normalcy that had resumed now that
they weren’t sleeping in the Tube stations at night. But the war was far from
won, and Marie sensed that something far worse was yet to come.
Pushing her doubts
aside, Marie pulled a book from her bag. It was poetry by Baudelaire, which she
loved because his elegant verse took her back to happier times as a child
summering on the coast in Brittany with her mother.
“Excuse me,” a man said
a moment later. She looked up, annoyed by the interruption. He was fortyish,
thin and unremarkable in a tweedy sport coat and glasses. A scone sat untouched
on the plate at the table next to her from which he had risen. “I was curious
about what you are reading.” She wondered if he were trying to make advances.
The intrusions were everywhere now with all of the American GIs in the city,
spilling from the pubs at midday and walking three abreast in the streets,
their jarring laughter breaking the stillness.
But the man’s accent was
British and his mild expression contained no hint of impropriety. Marie held up
the book so that he could see. “Would you mind reading me a bit?” he asked.
“I’m afraid I don’t speak French.”
“Really, I don’t think…”
she began to demur, surprised by the odd request.
“Please,” he said,
cutting her off, his tone almost imploring. “You’d be doing me a kindness.” She
wondered why it meant so much to him. Perhaps he had lost someone French or was
a veteran who had fought over there. “All right,” she relented. A few lines
couldn’t hurt. She began to read from the poem, N’importe où hors du monde (Anywhere
Out of the World). Her voice was self-conscious at first, but she felt
herself slowly gain confidence.
After a few sentences,
Marie stopped. “How was that?” She expected him to ask her to read further.
He did not. “You’ve
studied French?”
She shook her head. “No,
but I speak it. My mother was French and we spent summers there when I was a
child.” In truth, the summers had been an escape from her father, an angry
drunk unable to find work or hold down a job, resentful of her mother’s
breeding and family money and disappointed that Marie wasn’t a boy. That was
the reason Marie and her mother summered far away in France. And it was the reason
Marie had run away from the Herefordshire manor where she’d been raised to
London when she was eighteen, took her mother’s surname. She knew if she stayed
in the house she had dreaded all her childhood with her father’s worsening
temper, she wouldn’t make it out alive.
