The Nightingale

                                                           

Maytrees min (youngest daughter) quite recently, bought me a copy of the above book to read. 

I began reading the  biography of the two sisters, last month.

Upon opening the book I was initially dismayed to find that the print was extremely small. However that dismay  quickly changed to fascination. 

Some blurb on the book from Waterstones reads

Mining sisterhood, sacrifice and survival, The Nightingale charts the path of two very different sisters in Nazi-occupied France, each embarking on her own dangerous path towards love and freedom... It is a heart-breakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the endurance of women...This story is about what it was like to be a woman during World War II, when women’s stories were all too often forgotten or overlooked.

The book was certainly the most interesting biography or should I say biographies as two sisters with contrasting characters are portrayed throughout.

Perhaps a spoiler for those intending to read the book first published here about six years ago; though the bravery of women during WWII is surely underestimated, had the 'Nightingale'  been man he would have been captured by the occupying German army and executed at an early stage. 

The Germans were clearly hunting for a man and assumed that no woman would be directly involved. Thus the Nightingale's success in ensuring that so many airmen shot down by the Germans into German occupied France, were so successfully and secretly transferred by her over the Pyrenees to  British diplomats in  Spain.