Sebastian Faulks

American historian Hannah intends to immerse herself in World War II research in Paris, wary of paying much attention to the city where a youthful misadventure once left her dejected. But a chance encounter with Tariq, a Moroccan teenager whose visions of the City of Lights as a world of opportunity and rebirth starkly contrast with her own, disrupts her plan. Hannah agrees to take Tariq in as a lodger, forming an unexpected connection with the young...

Robert, a British doctor haunted by World War II memories, agrees to write a biography of a renowned specialist in memory loss who possesses unsettling knowledge of Robert's past.

Sixteen-year-old Jacques Rebière is living a humble life in rural France, studying butterflies and frogs by candlelight in his bedroom. Across the Channel, in England, the playful Thomas Midwinter, also sixteen, is enjoying a life of ease, resigned to follow his father's wishes and to pursue a career in medicine. A fateful seaside meeting four years later sets the two young men on a profound course of friendship and discovery; they will become pioneers...

It's World War II and Charlotte has been trained to be an undercover courier for England. She straps on a parachute and falls from the sky into Vichy France. There she will assist the French Resistance in its defiance of Nazi occupation. Once behind enemy lines, she keeps secret her personal mission to find her lover, an RAF pilot downed over France.