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Sunday 16 October 2022

The Woman Outside the Walls by Suzanne Goldring


💥💥💥due to be published 18-Oct-2022💥💥💥

Description from Goodreads:

"I always knew it would come out one day. They are finding everyone who has stayed hidden. They would have come to me in the end.

Hamburg, 1942. Seventeen-year-old Anna knows she can never tell her proud parents the truth about where she is going. She must hide the fact that she is pregnant, that the father of her unborn child is dead and that she is on her way to a special maternity home, where her baby will be given to a perfect family. She tells herself that this is the best solution. She doesn’t expect to feel the rush of love for her beautiful baby boy in the white blanket, or the devastation when he is snatched from her, never to be seen again.

Desperate to forget her grief, she sees an advert for a secretary in a prison, far away in the east. Days later, she leaves Hamburg, travelling eastwards by train, feeling as if a whole new life is about to begin. It is the biggest mistake she will ever make.

London, 2016. Ninety-year-old Anna sits on the edge of her bed, hands trembling, eyes brimming with tears, as she looks at the picture of the soldier in the newspaper. Her friends and neighbors know her as a kindly old lady who bakes cakes and always has time to listen to their troubles. They don’t know about the hated green uniform she burned, the memories of the prisoners she tried to help and the bombed and blackened city she once called home. But now the time for a reckoning has come, will revealing the truth free Anna or destroy her?"

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Anna is in her 90's and living a quiet and peaceful life but she has lived with the horrors and struggles of her past and of the fear that it's going to catch up with her.

Told from different time lines - pre-war, post war and the present - and mainly from Anna's perspective, this is the story of her life; the good, the bad and the ugly.   I admit it did, at times, feel like it was jumping from one time to another and not always, I felt, in a logical way which made it a bit hard to keep up but you soon get caught up in the story.

This is a real thought-provoker and makes you ask yourself some difficult questions about what you would do to survive and if you do, how do you reconcile the decisions you have made.

Although this is a work of fiction, there are historical facts that are interwoven in the story which makes it feel quite authentic and I must thank Bookouture and NetGalley for enabling me to read and share my thoughts of The Woman Outside the Walls.

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