Emma's Review: The Twins on the Train by Suzanne Goldring

Reviewed by Emma Crowley 

As the smell of smoke drifts through the air, Jewish people lock their doors. They no longer feel welcome in their home city, and while some mothers hide their children, others take them, clad in dark threadbare coats, to the crowded train station and the hope of a new life.

Rosa has feared for her twins since they were born two weeks ago. As she huddles in her filthy house, crammed in with her neighbours, she sees children growing weaker. It may be too late for her and her seven-year-old daughter Therese. But can she find a way out for her precious babies?

Dora scans the desperate crowd on the platform, despairing as she knows there isn’t room for all of them on the train to England. And when a woman thrusts a basket containing newborn twins into her arms, a shiver of dread slides down her spine. Babies aren’t authorised to travel – how can she keep them hidden from the cold-eyed soldiers?

She knows this mother wants the same thing she does – safety for these innocent children. But will she be able to help this brave woman before it is too late?

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Emma's Review: The Girl Who Never Came Back by Suzanne Goldring

Reviewed by Suzanne Goldring 

Someone is trying to hide what really happened to her. I must do anything to discover the truth. Even risk my own life….

Paris 1945. I sent nineteen-year-old Phyllis, my youngest recruit, into a city crawling with enemy soldiers. But she was smart as a tack, and her gold-flecked hazel eyes could capture anyone’s hearts. I was certain she would succeed. But then she disappeared without a trace. And no one will help me discover what happened to her.

I am desperate to find her – the girl I told to lie to her family about where she was going. She was excited to be doing her bit, but she was young and naïve. It was my job to make her understand the peril she would face. Is it my fault she is missing?

Now I creep into a beautiful house on a tree-lined street, the headquarters of cold-hearted German soldiers. It was the last place she was seen. I trail my fingers along the gilded furniture and see the light dance off the glittering chandeliers. On the top floor, I find the dates inscribed by beaten prisoners, and my heart sinks as I realise she was shown no mercy here.

As I search for the answers her family are begging for, I learn that the girl I swore to protect was moved around in secret. And when I find a message scratched on a food tin in a damp cell, I know I am getting closer to Phyllis at last…

But there are some who want the secrets of the war to be left in the past. Someone is sending me threatening letters, trying to scare me to stop... In finding answers about the girl who haunts my dreams, am I not only risking her life but my own too?

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Emma's Review: The Woman Outside the Walls by Suzanne Goldring

Reviewed by Emma Crowley

Hamburg, 1942 Seventeen-year-old Anna knows she can never tell her proud parents the truth about where she is going. She must hide the fact that she is pregnant, that the father of her unborn child is dead and that she is on her way to a special maternity home, where her baby will be given to a perfect family. She tells herself that this is the best solution. She doesn’t expect to feel the rush of love for her beautiful baby boy in the white blanket, or the devastation when he is snatched from her, never to be seen again.

Desperate to forget her grief, she sees an advert for a secretary in a prison, far away in the east. Days later, she leaves Hamburg, travelling eastwards by train, feeling as if a whole new life is about to begin. It is the biggest mistake she will ever make.

London, 2016 Ninety-year-old Anna sits on the edge of her bed, hands trembling, eyes brimming with tears, as she looks at the picture of the soldier in the newspaper. Her friends and neighbours know her as a kindly old lady who bakes cakes and always has time to listen to their troubles. They don’t know about the hated green uniform she burned, the memories of the prisoners she tried to help and the bombed and blackened city she once called home. But now the time for a reckoning has come, will revealing the truth free Anna or destroy her? 

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Emma's Review: The Girl with the Scarlet Ribbon by Suzanne Goldring

Reviewed by Emma Crowley

Florence, 1943. A missing painting. A war-scarred city. A brave young girl on a black bicycle risking her life for the country she loved…

As the bells toll and arrogant soldiers torment her family, fourteen-year-old Gabriella is determined to act. She seeks out her old friend Stefanina, an unlikely member of the Italian resistance with her dark curls and scarlet ribbon. Soon the two girls are criss-crossing the river with deadly information in their bicycle baskets. But then one terrible day Stefanina disappears…

London 2019. Sofia is mourning the loss of her father, a famous painter. Desperate to feel closer to him, she begins to go through his paintings of wartime Florence, a time in his life he would never talk about. But then she realises one is missing…

Determined to learn more, she discovers that he had a sister she never knew about. She flies to Florence, the place of his tortured memories, to meet her aunt Gabriella, an elegant old woman living in a palazzo filled with roses. There in a little bedroom, locked away from the world, she finds the missing painting, a tiny picture of a beautiful girl with a scarlet ribbon.

As Sofia uncovers the story behind the hidden painting, a tale of extraordinary bravery and terrible betrayal emerges. But will understanding her family’s haunted past bring her peace, or further heartbreak?

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Emma's Review: The Shut Away Sisters by Suzanne Goldring

Reviewed by Emma Crowley

Two ordinary sisters. A long and brutal war. A heroic sacrifice…

London, 1915. As German bombs rain down on the East End of London and hungry children queue for rations in the blistering cold, fifteen-year-old Florrie is forced to grow up fast. With her father fighting in the muddy trenches, Florrie turns to her older sister Edith for comfort. But the war has changed Edith. She has grown quiet, with dark shadows under her eyes, and has started leaving the house at night in secret. When Florrie follows her sister through the dark and winding streets of London, she is shocked by what she discovers. But she knows she must keep her sister’s secret for the sake of their family, even if she herself must pay the ultimate price…

Years later Kate, running from her broken relationship, is sorting through her dead aunt Florrie’s house, which she shared with her sister Edith. As she sits on the threadbare carpets, looking at photos of Florrie during the war, she notices the change in her aunt – from carefree young girl with a hopeful smile to a hollow-cheeked young woman, with dark sad eyes.

Determined to put her family’s ghosts to rest, Kate must unearth the secret past of her two aunts. Why is there a hidden locked room in the little house they shared? What is the story behind the abandoned wedding dress wrapped in tissue and tied up with a ribbon? And when Kate discovers the tragic secrets that have bound her family together, will she ever be able to move on?

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Emma's Review: The Girl Without a Name by Suzanne Goldring

 Reviewed by Emma Crowley

September 1940. As the bombs of the Blitz fall on London, Ruby and Stevie are falling in love. United by a shocking experience when they were evacuees, Ruby believes that she understands Stevie like nobody else can. But then Stevie is sent abroad into danger and as Ruby waits, desperately, for letters with foreign stamps that never come, she begins to fear that he is lost forever.

August 2004. Billie has rushed to her father Dick’s hospital bedside. A terrible stroke has robbed him of his speech, and he is a shell of the man he was before. But when Billie finds a crumpled black and white photo in his wallet of a smiling, dark-haired girl she doesn’t recognise, Dick frantically tries to talk. Billie knows that he is trying to tell her something important, and she must ask the questions her father cannot. All she has to go on is the name he is just able to mumble. Ruby.

Billie tracks down Ruby’s aunt, her only surviving relative, and learns that Ruby’s life contained great love, but also great tragedy. Billie is determined to find out what happened to this brave woman, last seen leaving her home for a secret weekend away. Why did nobody miss her? And how is she connected to Billie’s beloved father? Can Billie lay the ghosts of the past to rest, even if it means revealing the darkest secrets of her father’s life and breaking her own heart?

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Emma's Review: Burning Island by Suzanne Goldring

Reviewed by Emma Crowley

They were not her children. But she would protect them with her life…

Corfu 1944. Though they don’t know it, five-year-old Matilde and three-year-old Anna have kissed their mother for the last time. The Nazis have reached their sun-scorched home, and they are being taken to a place of safety, on the north-eastern tip of the rocky island, to be hidden at great risk by kindly Agata and her husband until the terrible war is over.

Matilde and Anna’s tears are soothed by Agata’s bedtime stories, but she is always alert. So far no soldiers have ventured down the steep rocky hillside to their secret haven, but Agata knows they are constantly scouring the island for missing Jews. And then, on a day when Agata’s husband is away, a German soldier appears…

2016. Under a baking June sun, Amber and her husband arrive in Corfu from England, hoping for a fresh start. But not everyone is pleased by their arrival, and with the pressures of pregnancy, the couple grow further apart. Desperate to find a sense of belonging for herself and her unborn child, Amber finds herself drawn to the local story of two little girls, left by their parents and hidden for their own protection.

But there are some who would rather Amber left Corfu’s terrible history well in the past. Can Amber uncover the heart-breaking truth about the two little girls, and what happened after a German soldier took a swim in the bay by their house? If she does, can the secrets of the past help her find happiness, or send her running from the island, alone?

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Emma's Review: My Name is Eva by Suzanne Goldring

Reviewed by Emma Crowley

You can pay a terrible price for keeping a promise…

Evelyn Taylor-Clarke sits in her chair at Forest Lawns Care Home in the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by residents with minds not as sharp as hers. It would be easy to dismiss Evelyn as a muddled old woman, but her lipstick is applied perfectly, and her buttons done up correctly. Because Evelyn is a woman with secrets and Evelyn remembers everything. She can never forget the promise she made to the love of her life, to discover the truth about the mission that led to his death, no matter what it cost her…

When Evelyn’s niece Pat opens an old biscuit tin to find a photo of a small girl with a red ball entitled ‘Liese, 1951’ and a passport in another name, she has some questions for her aunt. And Evelyn is transported back to a place in Germany known as ‘The Forbidden Village,’ where a woman who called herself Eva went where no one else dared, amongst shivering prisoners, to find the man who gambled with her husband’s life…

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