The librarian spy A novel of World War II

Madeline Martin

eBook - 2022

"Readers will be on the edge of their seats…. A brilliant tale of resistance, courage and ultimately hope." -Kelly Rimmer, New York Times bestselling author of The Warsaw Orphan From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Bookshop in London comes a moving new novel inspired by the true history of America's library spies of World War II. Ava thought her job as a librarian at the Library of Congress would mean a quiet, routine existence. But an unexpected offer from the US military has brought her to Lisbon with a new mission: posing as a librarian while working undercover as a spy gathering intelligence. Meanwhile, in occupied France, Elaine has begun an apprenticeship at a printing press run by members of the ...Resistance. It's a job usually reserved for men, but in the war, those rules have been forgotten. Yet she knows that the Nazis are searching for the press and its printer in order to silence them. As the battle in Europe rages, Ava and Elaine find themselves connecting through coded messages and discovering hope in the face of war. "Uplifting, inspiring and suspenseful, this is one to savor!" -Natasha Lester, New York Times bestselling author of The Riviera House "Madeline Martin is a fantastic author. The Librarian Spy is a stunning tour de force of historical fiction." -Karen Robards, author of The Black Swan of Paris For more historical fiction from Madeline Martin, don't miss The Last Bookshop in London.

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Subjects
Published
[United States] : Hanover Square Press 2022.
Language
English
Corporate Author
hoopla digital
Main Author
Madeline Martin (Author)
Corporate Author
hoopla digital (-)
Online Access
Instantly available on hoopla.
Cover image
Physical Description
1 online resource
Format
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
ISBN
9780369720207
Access
AVAILABLE FOR USE ONLY BY IOWA CITY AND RESIDENTS OF THE CONTRACTING GOVERNMENTS OF JOHNSON COUNTY, UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, HILLS, AND LONE TREE (IA).
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

This unusual WWII spy tale is based on the real-life work of the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC), an OSS-affiliated group organized by Fred Kilgour, later the founding director of OCLC. Multilingual Ava Harper is a librarian at the Library of Congress when she is recruited by IDC. Her assignment takes her to neutral but spy-drenched Lisbon, where she collects and microfilms print materials from enemy and enemy-occupied countries. Analysts then scour the documents for intel about Nazi strategy. Ava falls into a romance with a British consulate officer, and both attract the attention of German agents. The narrative jumps between Ava's story and that of Parisian resistance worker Hélène Bélanger, who operates a clandestine printing press and attempts to secure the exfiltration of a Jewish woman and her son, using coded messages deciphered by Ava. Both plots generate suspense but are weighed down somewhat by an excess of melodrama and by occasionally trite phrasing ("jaunts down memory lane"). Still, the wartime ambience in both Lisbon and Paris and the thoroughly fascinating story of the IDC will please all lovers of WWII espionage.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Chiaverini's Switchboard Soldiers chronicles the women of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, who weren't even eligible to enlist in the army but helped facilitate communication on the battlefield as bombs fell around them and pandemic raged during World War I (150,000-copy first printing). French Resistance fighter Elise and German soldier Sebastian fall in love in Occupied Paris and face moral crisis at war's end in Druart's The Last Hours in Paris (45,000-copy first printing). In Kidd's The Night Ship, sad-eyed young Gil is sent to live with his grandfather in a Western Australian fishing community and learns about the 1629 sinking of a ship whose passengers included the newly orphaned Mayken, sailing to what was then the Dutch East Indies (75,000-copy first printing). In Martin's latest, Ava is The Librarian Spy, working undercover in World War II Lisbon to collect intelligence and finding connection through coded messages with Elaine, apprenticed at a press run by the Resistance in Occupied France (150,000-copy first printing). Lock continues his successful "American Novels" series with Voices in the Dead House, which braids together the experiences of Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott in Civil War-torn Washington, DC. In Sister Mother Warrior, celebrated Island Queen author Riley conveys the Haitian Revolution through the stories of two women: Marie-Claire Bonheur, the first empress of Haiti, and West African-born warrior Gran Toya (100,000-copy first printing).

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