First published 2016
Gaëlle de Barbet watches helplessly as French police drag away her best friend Rebekah Feldmann and her family in 1940. The German army has occupied France, and the local commandant has seized Gaëlle's family estate outside Lyon for his headquarters. When the Germans kill her father and brother and her mother descends into madness, sixteen-year-old Gaëlle joins the French Resistance. She smuggles Jewish children to safety under the noses of the Gestapo and French collaborators. The German commandant approaches her with a secret plan to preserve French artwork, but these covert missions will later brand her as a traitor. Falsely accused of collaboration after the war ends, Gaëlle flees to Paris as an orphan. She builds a new life as a Dior model, marries, becomes a mother, and eventually runs a Holocaust museum. Decades later, her granddaughter, now a political journalist, fights to clear Gaëlle's name and reveal the truth about her grandmother's wartime courage.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, war, world-war-ii
Vibes: emotional, intimate, suspenseful
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, found-family
Setting: France, Lyon, Paris
Period: 1940, Decades Later
321 pages · Hardcover · Delacorte Press
Content warnings: death, violence