English French Wars

An extraordinary wartime memoir, combining the best kind of adventure story with a coming-of-age testimony of unforgettable resonance and poignancy.

September 2011, Halkidiki, Northern Greece: A solitary 86-year-old man gazes across an Aegean headland, knowing that he must finally confront his past. He begins to write...September 1939, Nieppe, Northern France:14 year-old Stephen is living with his family, 25 kilometres from Ypres. His French mother battles with her encroaching blindness.

Nazi-occupied Aquitaine, 1943: A beautiful young woman is found murdered in the shadow of the Bergerac Prefecture. Auguste Ran, assistant chief of police, suspects Brunner, a German security police major, of the crime. The more Auguste investigates, the more obsessed he becomes with bringing down the seemingly untouchable Brunner. Auguste begins to realize he has been conveniently ignoring the Nazi atrocities going on around him and understands too late the human cost of his own participation in the internment of the local Jewish population.

In this audiobook, read by Paul Spera, each historical event is replaced into context and presented in clear and easy-to-read snippets, so that younger and older readers can deepen their understanding of how modern France came to be and broaden their culture.

In this haunting memoir that reflects on the Holocaust and its legacy, award-winning author Sandell Morse discovers stories of bravery and resistance enacted during WWII in Southern France. In the course of six years at a writing residency in France, during which she met with survivors and historians, she painstakingly pieces together the puzzle that had been beguiling her over the years: What was the real story of the French Jews under the Vichy government during The Second World War?

Though forced to fight for the hated British, Morgan MacKinnon would no more betray the men he leads than slit his own throat - not even when he was captured by the French and threatened with an agonizing death by fire at the hands of their Abenaki allies. Only the look of innocent longing in the eyes of a convent-bred French lass could make him question his vow to escape and return to the Rangers. And soon the sweet passion he awoke in Amalie had him cursing the war that forced him to choose between upholding his honor and pledging himself to the woman he loves.

In the heart of war-torn France, two brothers, Markus and Charles Lefèvre, rise to defy the encroaching darkness of Nazi occupation. Their bond, forged in the trenches of the Great War, becomes a bastion of hope as they lead a courageous resistance. Their journeys unfold in two volumes: "La Maquis Cell" and "The Eagles of Vercors."

Major Connor MacKinnon despises his commander, Lord William Wentworth, beyond all other men. Ordered to rescue Wentworth's niece after the Shawnee take her captive, he expects Lady Sarah Woodville to be every bit as contemptible as her uncle. Instead, he finds a brave and beautiful lass in desperate peril. But the only way to free Sarah is for Connor to defeat the Shawnee warrior who kidnapped her - and claim her himself.

When her favourite beech tree is felled in a storm, Ann feels as if someone has died. But when long-hidden seed packets are found inside the trunk, Ann realizes there are more memories than her own lurking within the ancient tree. A century earlier, head gardener William Hatherwick and Hester Mordaunt, mistress of Beechgrave, share a love for the mighty estate - and an undeclared love for each other. But when war breaks out, William is sent to the battlefields of France, and as the conflict rages on, Hester grieves beneath the tree.

The bombs were falling and the smoke rising from the concentration camps, but all Hitler's daughter knew was the world of lessons with Fraulein Gelber and the hedgehogs she rescued from the cold. Was it just a story or did Hitler's daughter really exist? And If you were Hitler's daughter, would all the horror that occurred be your fault, too? Do things that happened a long time ago still matter?

Despite the assurances that the French would never hand their ships over to Germany, Churchill would put in motion a campaign attempting to destroy their fleet. As a result, Operation Catapult would be one of the most controversial and unique episodes of World War II.

Left profoundly deaf after an accident, Émile is no stranger to isolation—or heartbreak. Now, as Nazi planes loom over Guernsey, he senses life is about to change forever. Trapped in a tense, fearful marriage, Isabelle doesn't know what has become of Émile and the future she hoped for. But when she glimpses him from the window of the French House, their lives collide once more. Lieutenant Schreiber is more comfortable wielding a paintbrush than a pistol. But he has little choice in the role he is forced to play in the occupying forces—or in his own forbidden desires.

The once impoverished medical student Agnes Glock is now the fabulously wealthy Mrs Mulberry. Her estate in the mountains is magnificent, a haven for those too ravaged by the Great War to cope with the society that first condemned them to battle and which now shuns them. The War has, however, stolen Agnes's chance to graduate as a doctor, as well as the fiance she adored.

After a failed honey-trap mission for British Intelligence leads to the breakdown of her marriage, French journalist Iris escapes to Dijon, seeking refuge in the cottage of her beloved aunt, Eva. But Eva is gone, the streets are full of distrust, and Iris is soon followed by the very last man she wants to see – the British civil servant and traitor she was tasked with catching, now keen to rekindle their affair. Eva’s home used to be a comforting place, where the locals sought out Eva’s homemade tinctures and cures and gifted jars of fresh honey from the garden. Now it is a place of danger.

The invasion across the Channel came in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. That day, forever known as D-Day, the Allies commenced Operation Overlord by staging the largest and most complex amphibious invasion in human history. The complex operation would require tightly coordinated naval and air bombardment, paratroopers, and even inflatable tanks that would be able to fire on fortifications from the coastline, all while landing over 150,000 men across nearly 70 miles of French beaches.

Set during and after the First World War, A Very Long Engagement is the tale of a young woman's search for her fiancé who she believes might still be alive despite having officially been reported as "killed in the line of duty." Unable to walk since childhood, fearless Mathilde Donnay is undeterred in her quest as she scours the country for information about five wounded French soldiers who were brutally abandoned by their own troops. A Very Long Engagement is a mystery, a love story, and an extraordinary portrait of life in France before and after the War.

At 3 a.m. on February 21, 1865, a band of 65 Confederate horsemen slowly made its way down Greene Street in Cumberland, Maryland. Thinking the riders were disguised Union scouts, the few Union soldiers out that bitterly cold morning paid little attention to them. In the meantime, over 3,500 Yankee soldiers peacefully slept. Within 30 minutes, McNeill’s rangers had kidnapped Union generals George Crook and Benjamin Kelley from their hotels and spirited them out of town.

In February 1793, in the wake of the War of American Independence and one year after British prime minister William Pitt the Younger had predicted fifteen years of peace, the National Convention of Revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain and the Netherlands. France thus initiated nearly a quarter century of armed conflict with Britain. During this fraught and still-contested period, historian Nathaniel Jarrett suggests, Pitt and his ministers forged a diplomatic policy and military strategy that envisioned an international system anticipating the Vienna settlement of 1815.

France, 1942: A Nazi Officer steals a Matisse painting that becomes a symbol of freedom against the oppressors. Francesca, an artist and conservator, grieving over the death of her daughter at the hands of German soldiers, flees Paris. She has only a handful of paintings and a desire for revenge she is ill-equipped to pursue. In the long, hard winter that follows, she joins a group of Partisans in their battle to free France and salvage her culture. She becomes embroiled in a plot to recover Le Mur Rose, the stolen painting.

When a small town constable sees an elderly woman scavenging in the bins behind the general store he is not sure what to do with her. The woman seems confused and speaks only French so he enlists the help of the local school teacher as translator. They are shocked to learn the woman thinks she is in Occupied France and that the war is still going. The following day the woman has recovered and is once more speaking in English. They learn her name is Mary and they coax Mary into telling her story. She is at first reluctant, saying that the story is not really hers, but the story of how a ...

In February 1944, the French Resistance in the Amiens area was in turmoil. Its strength had been decimated by German aggression and the work of a number of traitors in their midst, and hundreds of its members languished in the city's formidable jail, awaiting an almost certain death at the hands of their captors. When two Allied intelligence officers were incarcerated alongside them it became clear that immediate action was imperative.