The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah

If I have learnt anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.

Vianne and Isabelle are two very different sisters. Vianne, the oldest, is married to her childhood sweetheart and lives with their daughter in the French countryside. Isabelle is younger, tempestuous and recently expelled from convent school. When the Nazis invade, both sisters are caught up in the chaos and each survives - and fights - in their own way.

I started reading The Nightingale with a frown. As I read about Vianne cooking soup for her husband and Isabelle falling in love with a man she'd met for ten seconds, I thought this was going to be the kind of historical romance my gran reads; in other words, a story about women waiting at home for their men to come back from the war. OMG, was I wrong! This is a story about women fighting and surviving World War Two in their own way. I'll be honest - I found both sisters borderline insufferable at first - Vianne all holier-than-thou while Isabelle is irritatingly rebellious even if it puts other people in danger. But they grow through the story and become more sympathetic as the choices they make change them, for better or for worse. The most powerful aspect of The Nightingale, however, was the way that Kristen Hannah captured the realities of wartime. All through the book, I got an overwhelming sense of deprivation and hopelessness as supplies dwindled and a community slowly turned against each other in a desperate battle of survival. Also, the ending caught me totally off guard and I'm not ashamed to admit I had a little sob.

Men think wars are all about them. The Nightingale shows women fighting a war in their own way and making sacrifices of their own. I enjoyed it a lot, and recommend it to anyone who enjoys historical fiction from a female perspective.

Read On: All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is another highly-rated book set in France during WW2.