I first heard of this story when I took a master from the author at Fishtrap. He was talking about his mother and the Doughnut Dollies in WWII, which I never heard of. It is sometimes a harrowing tale, pretty much following his mother's real story of following the soldiers into some of the worst battles in France, Belgium, Netherlands and Germany.
I chose it for my discerning book club.
This "powerful, uplifting, and deeply personal novel" (Kristin Hannah, #1 NYT bestselling author of The Four Winds), at once "a heart-wrenching wartime drama" (Christina Baker Kline, #1 NYT bestselling author of Orphan Train) and "a moving and graceful tribute to heroic women" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), asks the question: What if a friendship forged on the front lines of war defines a life forever?
"Urrea's touch is sure, his exuberance carries you through . . . He is a generous writer, not just in his approach to his craft but in the broader sense…
This story is very personal to the author, based loosely on his mother's and father's experiences during WWII. She was in the Norwegian resistance, he was an RAF pilot. Great fun to see how he spins it. The characters are very likeable, the plot intriguing. P.S. Chris Humphreys narrates all of my Norway in WWII thrillers.
This is the first book I've read from this Swedish author. I picked it up at Left Coast Crime in Seattle this past year. Beautifully written with story line that keeps you guessing. A bit of Swedish folklore about a particular bird and what it portends is woven in.
One of the New York Times’s Best Crime Novels of the Year • A Good Morning America Buzz Pick
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A serial killer in a small Swedish town commits his first murder the same night the prime minister is assassinated—a “thrilling and profoundly poignant” (Angie Kim) novel by one of the country’s top criminologists, hailed as “the finest crime writer we have in Sweden” (David Lagercrantz, author of The Girl in the Spider’s Web and other novels in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series)
“Christoffer Carlsson is to the police procedural what Cormac McCarthy is to the Western.”—Anthony Marra,…
An experienced intelligence agent at 22, Tore Haugland faces certain danger when he accepts an assignment in occupied Norway knowing that his predecessor was killed by the Gestapo only a week before. The dying agent left a mysterious message in his interruption code that London calls the “Brisling Code.” London wants Haugland to find out what it means as well as to gather information on the expansion of the U boat base in Bergen. Haugland is sent to work at a drafting office in a shipyard. His mission is jeopardized when a ruthless SS officer, Hans Becker, with his own secrets, is alerted to his presence by a traitor at the Verks. Becker will do anything to find him. If Haugland can’t discover the meaning of the Brisling Code in time, it could cost him his life and expose the members of the local resistance he works with. If he does, it could hurt the people he has grown to care about. But what if the message was written down wrong?
