Acts of Love and War
Read by
Avita Jay
Release:
08/23/2022
Runtime:
11h 48m
Unabridged
Quantity:
Acts of Love and War weaves together two highly dramatic stories. The love story . . . [keeps] the reader guessing. . . . The war story concerns the heroic efforts by Lucy and fellow aid workers to save the children. . . . The stories of both the refugees and their protectors are told with honesty, insight and a tenderness that cannot fail to move the reader.
Historia Magazine
A remarkable story of love and sacrifice centred on three young English volunteers in the bloody Spanish Civil War, from the author of The Prisoner's Wife.
1936. Civil war is tearing Spain apart, and the world is on the brink of chaos...
Twenty-one-year-old Lucy is frustrated with her constrained life in Hertfordshire, teaching and keeping house for her domineering father. But she is happy to be living next door to Tom and Jamie, two brothers she has known since childhood, and whom she loves equally.
But everyone's lives are turned upside down when Tom, the younger, decides to join the Republican cause in the bloody war in Spain. His older, fervently Catholic brother Jamie soon follows--but as a reporter for the opposing forces that support General Franco in keeping Spain rigidly authoritarian, with the help of both Hitler and Mussolini.
Lucy decides the only way to ensure the brothers' safety is to defy her father and travel to Spain herself and persuade them to come home. Yet when she sees the horrific effects of the war on the people--especially the children--she quickly joins the lifesaving work of the Quaker volunteers who have arrived from almost as many countries as have the International Brigades of fighters. Lucy knows that both brothers are in love with her; she herself is deeply torn between them.
The atrocities and casualties mount and Lucy knows that the question of which man she might spend her life with might be irrelevent, as the chances of either of them surviving diminish with every passing day.
This meticulously researched, deeply affecting novel is based on real memoirs of the Spanish Civil War. It is both a love story and a tribute to the remarkable women who fought with compassion and bravery to save the innocent victims of a war that was a foretaste of the carnage soon to come in World War II.
1936. Civil war is tearing Spain apart, and the world is on the brink of chaos...
Twenty-one-year-old Lucy is frustrated with her constrained life in Hertfordshire, teaching and keeping house for her domineering father. But she is happy to be living next door to Tom and Jamie, two brothers she has known since childhood, and whom she loves equally.
But everyone's lives are turned upside down when Tom, the younger, decides to join the Republican cause in the bloody war in Spain. His older, fervently Catholic brother Jamie soon follows--but as a reporter for the opposing forces that support General Franco in keeping Spain rigidly authoritarian, with the help of both Hitler and Mussolini.
Lucy decides the only way to ensure the brothers' safety is to defy her father and travel to Spain herself and persuade them to come home. Yet when she sees the horrific effects of the war on the people--especially the children--she quickly joins the lifesaving work of the Quaker volunteers who have arrived from almost as many countries as have the International Brigades of fighters. Lucy knows that both brothers are in love with her; she herself is deeply torn between them.
The atrocities and casualties mount and Lucy knows that the question of which man she might spend her life with might be irrelevent, as the chances of either of them surviving diminish with every passing day.
This meticulously researched, deeply affecting novel is based on real memoirs of the Spanish Civil War. It is both a love story and a tribute to the remarkable women who fought with compassion and bravery to save the innocent victims of a war that was a foretaste of the carnage soon to come in World War II.
Release:
2022-08-23
Runtime:
11h 48m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780735246096
Publisher:
Penguin Random House
Praise