Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France - Softcover

Shakespeare, Nicholas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099555662 ISBN 13: 9780099555667

Publisher: Vintage, 2014

Synopsis

The astonishing true story of a young woman's adventures, and misadventures, in the dangerous world of Nazi-occupied France.

For Priscilla, pre-war Paris was an exciting carousel of suitors, soirées and heartbreak, and eventually a lavish wedding to a French aristocrat.

But the arrival of the Nazi tanks signalled the end of life as a Vicomtesse, and the beginning of a precarious existence under German Occupation.

Over half a century later, her nephew, Nicholas Shakespeare, found a box of Priscilla's notebooks and journals. He began investigating the rumours that she had escaped a prisoner-of-war camp and fought for the Resistance - and he finally unearthed the truth behind suspicions of disreputable love affairs and far darker secrets.

About this title

Review:

"A pin-sharp biography which unfurls like gripping fiction... wonderful, haunting, thought-provoking" (Melanie Reid The Times)

"I have not read a better portrait of the moral impossibility of that time and place for people, like Priscilla, who found themselves trapped in it... A wonderful book" (Daily Telegraph)

"As Shakespeare acknowledges, his aunt’s is one of millions of wartime stories. But thanks to the extensive paperwork, and his energetic digging, he creates a detailed and vivid narrative. This is a moving, and constantly surprising story" (Matthew Bell Independent on Sunday)

"So gripping it reads like a novel" (Rachel Johnson Evening Standard)

"This mysterious story of the Occupation in France has all the qualities of a fascinating novel, with exquisite social, sexual and moral nuance" (Antony Beevor)

"Shakespeare offers a nuanced and detailed psychological study of the effect of the Second World war on an ordinary woman. The result is just as absorbing as any biography of a war hero" (Sunday Times)

"Nicholas Shakespeare has employed all his superb gifts as a writer to tell the picaresque tale of his aunt in wartime occupied France. Priscilla is a femme fatale worthy of fiction, and the author traces her tangled, troubled, romantic and often tragically unromantic experiences through one of the most dreadful periods of 20th-century history" (Max Hastings)

"Priscilla brilliantly exposes the tangled complexities behind that question so easily asked from the comfort of a peacetime armchair: “What would I have done?"" (Observer)

"Priscilla's descent into hell runs eerily parallel to that of France itself; Faustian, fascinating and in the end extremely sad" (Sebastian Faulks Observer, Books of the Year)

"An account of the author’s aunt’s life in France under the Nazis. Her descent parallels that of France: Grim but fascinating" (Sebastian Faulks Observer)

Book Description:

The astonishing true story of a young woman's adventures, and misadventures, in the dangerous world of Nazi-occupied France

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0099555662
• ISBN 13: 9780099555667
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464