The Code Of Love: A True Story - Hardcover

Linklater, Andro

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0750517069 ISBN 13: 9780750517065

Publisher: Magna Large Print Books, 2001

Synopsis

For fifty years, Pamela Kirrage longed to unlock the secrets of her husband's encrypted war diary. She was on the verge of giving up when she at last found a mathematician who became as obsessed with learning the secrets of the diary as she was. After months of painstaking investigation, he was finally able to crack the code, and in the process uncover the ending to an extraordinary World War II romance.

Pamela fell in love with RAF pilot Donald Hill in the summer of 1939, just a few months before he was sent to fight in Pacific. Although they planned to marry soon, Donald was captured after siege of Hong Kong and spent the next four years in a Japanese POW camp. Donald ultimately returned to Pamela, but he was never able to tell her about those lost years-and Pamela became convinced that the key to their happiness lay within the mysterious diary he brought back from the war. In The Code of Love Andro Linklater uses the decoded diary as well as extensive research and interviews to paint a vivid portrait of the World War II era, turning this dramatic love story into an inspiring, unconventional epic.

About this title

Review:

Andro Linklater, the travel writer and prize-winning biographer of Compton Mackenzie, has discovered a truly thrilling and heartrending story. Here is his account of unimaginable suffering and of love surviving across several years and many thousands of miles of separation. It is also a portrait of another age, of reticence and understatement, duty and loyalty, before our own age with its rather different values of "self-fulfilment" and the tell-all confessional.

In the spring of 1939, the beautiful young Pamela Kirrage met and quickly became engaged to a handsome young RAF pilot called Donald Hill. Soon after, Hill was transferred out to Hong Kong. When the city fell to the invading Japanese Army, Hill was imprisoned in Sham Sui POW camp and what he suffered at the hands of the Japanese over the next few years left him a changed man for life. When he returned to Pamela and England, they got married but he could never talk about his time in the camp and eventually, in 1970, he was finally confined to hospital in a state of mental collapse. In 1985 he died in Pamela's arms. But the story does not end there. For Donald left behind a coded diary that took another decade to crack. When its meanings were revealed, it told the full story of just what had happened to Donald and, at last, Pamela understood. It is a remarkable account, sensitively written by Linklater, skilfully interweaving the thrills of code-breaking with the romantic early days and later dark days of Pamela and Donald's marriage. The Code of Love is fascinating, compassionate and deeply moving. --Christopher Hart

Review:

"It is impossible to read this book and not be moved."-Daily Telegraph (London)

"A true romance, evocative of a passing generation and their triumphs and tribulations."-Kirkus Reviews

"Linklater tells the story with great skill." -The Times (London)

"What makes the book compelling is its sympathy for real people coping with a world conflagration that had nothing to do with them." -The Herald (Scotland)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Magna Large Print Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0750517069
• ISBN 13: 9780750517065
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384