Category: Blog Tour

#BlogTour #BookReview Love in a Time of War by Adrienne Chinn @rararesources @OneMoreChapter_

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Love In A Time of WarWelcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for Love in a Time of War by Adrienne Chinn which is published on 3rd March. My thanks to Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for inviting me to take part in the tour and to One More Chapter for my digital review copy via NetGalley. Do check out the post by my tour buddies for today, The Page Ladies.

Love in a Time of War final revisedAbout the Book

Three sisters
The Great War
The end of innocence…

In 1913, in a quiet corner of London, the three Fry sisters are coming of age, dreaming of all the possibilities the bright future offers. But when war erupts their innocence is shattered and a new era of uncertainty begins.

Cecelia loves Max but his soldier’s uniform is German, not British, and suddenly the one man she loves is the one man she can’t have.

Jessie enlists in the army as a nurse and finally finds the adventure she’s craved when she’s sent to Gallipoli and Egypt, but it comes with an unimaginable cost.

Etta elopes to Capri with her Italian love, Carlo, but though her growing bump is real, her marriage certificate is a lie.

As the three sisters embark on journeys they never could have imagined, their mother Christina worries about the harsh new realities they face, and what their exposure to the wider world means for the secrets she’s been keeping…

Format: Paperback (480 pages)     Publisher: One More Chapter
Publication date: 3rd March 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find Love in a Time of War (The Three Fry Sisters #1) on Goodreads

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My Review

I was first introduced to the writing of Adrienne Chinn when I read The English Wife in 2020 and I remarked then on the author’s ability to enable the reader to navigate multiple timelines. Love in a Time of War is a little more straightforward, moving between events in the years 1913 to 1919, with occasional trips back to the 1890s.

Love in a Time of War is the first book in a trilogy featuring the Fry sisters – Cecilia (Celie) and non-identical twins, Jessica (Jessie) and Etta – and their mother, Christina. The author has created distinct personalities for the three sisters. Celie, the eldest, is clear-headed, thoughtful and has a strong sense of justice particularly when it comes to the question of women’s suffrage.  Etta is more headstrong, fired up by the desire to become an artist and willingly immersing herself in a bohemian lifestyle.  Jessie is the most serious of the sisters, determined to put her nursing skills to use and resist the pressure to follow the conventional path of marriage and motherhood.

The latter is the path their mother Christina is determined they should follow.  She appears almost puritanical in that respect, indeed one might say hyprocritical given what the reader learns about her early life.  Being more generous, perhaps her actions are driven by a genuine desire to prevent her daughters making the same unwise decisions that she did in allowing her heart to rule her head. Whatever her motivation, it seems to have the opposite effect to that she intended as both Celie and Etta become involved in relationships with men who do not make ideal husband material in the eyes of Christina. Even Jessie, who was my favourite character, eventually embarks on a relationship with a man who for many reasons would probably not be welcomed with open arms in the Fry household. (I’d have welcomed him in any day!)

A character I’ve not mentioned so far is the sisters’ father, Gerald. He was the character with whom I empathised the most. Having done his best to provide a stable home for his daughters, encourage their interests and be a devoted husband, I was intensely moved by his discovery that all is not what it seems in his marriage. In keeping secrets from her family, I was reminded of the quotation from Marmion by Sir Walter Scott, ‘O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.’

Although the First World War provides the backdrop to many of the events in the book and transports the reader to a number of locations including Italy and Egypt, another constant element is the campaign for women’s suffrage.  All three sisters reflect the ideals of the movement, albeit in different ways. Celie’s is the most obvious, becoming involved in organising marches for Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and, later, writing newspaper articles and taking photographs to publicise the vital contribution of women to the war effort, such as those working in munitions factories.  Etta’s unconventional lifestyle is a challenge to social conventions that sees her hobnobbing with leading lights in the Bloomsbury Group such as artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and writer Virginia Woolf.  Jessica’s determination to forge her own path in life and be judged on her ability rather than her gender, represents the independence that many women were fighting for.

Those who love the idea of chance encounters will be rewarded by some coincidences that conjure up that famous line from the film Casablanca, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she walks into mine’. Indeed at one point, when a family connection is discovered between two strangers, one of them remarks, ‘Small world, isn’t it?’. Quite.  However these encounters are pivotal to the storyline, on occasions in quite deadly ways. They also serve to demonstrate that, in war, soldiers on both sides experience the same level of fear and anxiety and face the same moral dilemmas.

As might be expected from the first instalment in a trilogy, Love in a Time of War ends at significant moments in the lives of the sisters. With the war finally ended, what new horizons await them? There will be plenty of readers eager to find out.

In three words: Romantic, dramatic, expansive

Try something similar: Daughters of War by Dinah Jeffries

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Love In a Time of War - Adrienne_Chinn_24_6_21_210lo_res_OnlineAbout the Author

Adrienne Chinn was born in Grand Falls, Newfoundland, grew up in Quebec, and eventually made her way to London, England after a career as a journalist. In England she worked as a TV and film researcher before embarking on a career as an interior designer, lecturer, and writer. When not up a ladder or at the computer writing, she often can be found rummaging through flea markets or haggling in the Marrakech souk.

Her second novel, The English Wife – a timeslip story set in World War II England and contemporary Newfoundland – was published in June 2020 and has become an international bestseller. Her debut novel, The Lost Letter from Morocco, was published by Avon Books UK in 2019. Her latest novel, Love in a Time of War, set during WWI, is the first in a series of three books based around the changing lives of three English sisters and their half-Italian mother, with a timeslip to 1890s Capri and London.

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#BlogTour #BookReview The Matchmaker: A Spy in Berlin by Paul Vidich @RandomTTours @noexitpress

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Matchmaker BT PosterWelcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Matchmaker: A Spy in Berlin by Paul Vidich. My thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the tour and to No Exit for my digital review copy. Do check out the post by my tour buddy for today Sharon at Beyond The Books.

The Matchmaker imageAbout the Book

Berlin, 1989. Anne Simpson, an American who works as a translator at the Joint Operations Refugee Committee, thinks she is in a normal marriage with a charming East German. But then her husband disappears and the CIA and Western German intelligence arrive at her door. Nothing about her marriage is as it seems.

Anne had been targeted by the Matchmaker – a high level East German counterintelligence officer – who runs a network of Stasi agents. These agents are his ‘Romeos’ who marry vulnerable women in West Berlin to provide them with cover as they report back to the Matchmaker. Anne has been married to a spy, and now he has disappeared, and is presumably dead.

The CIA are desperate to find the Matchmaker because of his close ties to the KGB. They believe he can establish the truth about a high-ranking Soviet defector. They need Anne because she’s the only person who has seen his face – from a photograph that her husband mistakenly left out in his office – and she is the CIA’s best chance to identify him before the Matchmaker escapes to Moscow.

Time is running out as the Berlin Wall falls and chaos engulfs East Germany. But what if Anne’s
husband is not dead? And what if Anne has her own motives for finding the Matchmaker to deliver
a different type of justice?

Format: Paperback (256 pages)           Publisher: No Exit Press
Publication date: 17th February 2022 Genre: Thriller

Find The Matchmaker: A Spy in Berlin on Goodreads

Purchase links 
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Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Hive | Amazon UK
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My Review

As a fan of spy thrillers, the description of The Matchmaker’s subject matter was like catnip to me. A spy thriller set in Berlin immediately conjures up the decades after the Second World War but The Matchmaker is set at the very end of the Cold War in the months running up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

So this is John le Carré in the era of punk, as it were, with Anne Simpson, the book’s protagonist, observing teenagers with ‘steel-studded leather jackets with safety pin epaulets, spiked hair, heavy boots and defiant swaggers’ on the streets of West Berlin.  It remains a time of political tension in a divided Berlin with the forces of East and West Germany keeping watch over each other across the Berlin Wall and Stasi informers embedded in West Berlin neighbourhoods.  Anne sees stark reminders of the contrast between the relative prosperity of those living in West Berlin and the situation in East Berlin with ’empty streets, muted colours, a grim sameness and people who kept to themselves’.

The events in The Matchmaker are inspired by the real life figure of Markus Wolf, chief of foreign intelligence in the Ministry of State Security of the German Democratic Republic who successfully deployed Stasi agents as ‘Romeos’, targeting lonely women in a position to provide useful intelligence via men they believed married them for love.  Anne is just such a woman although she had begun to have suspicions about her husband Stefan’s frequent trips abroad and his ability to fund such a lavish lifestyle.

When Stefan disappears and is believed dead not only does Anne have to deal with her grief but the discovery that her husband was not the man she thought he was. ‘She saw the ruinous thread of incidents woven into a tapestry of deceit.’ As it turns out, the proof of very personal deceit is closer than she thinks.  Anne finds herself a pawn in a political game because she possesses the key to identifying The Matchmaker, a man sought by both the CIA and West German intelligence.  Threatened with the consequences of her marriage to Stefan if she does not assist their investigation, Anne finds herself in a dilemma. ‘There was peril if she cooperated and peril if she did not’.

Anne makes a superb leading character. She’s feisty, resourceful and grows in strength and determination as the novel progresses.  There were several occasions when I found myself silently mouthing ‘Go, girl’ and one incident in particular in which her riposte to an instruction had me laughing out loud.  When Anne realises political opportunism may trump justice, she decides to take matters into her own hands.

The Matchmaker has all the ingredients you would expect from an espionage thriller. It’s a fast-paced novel full of atmosphere, intrigue and some dramatic set pieces, all set against the backdrop of a pivotal moment in German history. If you’re looking for a book that evokes the feeling of a John le Carré novel I’m confident you will enjoy The Matchmaker. I’m now off to add the author’s previous books to my wishlist.

In three words: Taut, atmospheric, gripping

Try something similar: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré

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Paul Vidich Author picAbout the Author

Paul Vidich has had a distinguished career in music and media. Most recently, he served as Special Advisor to AOL and was Executive Vice President at the Warner Music Group, in charge of technology and global strategy. He serves on the Board of Directors of Poets & Writers and The New School for Social Research. A founder and publisher of the Storyville App, Vidich is also an award-winning author of short fiction. His novels, An Honorable Man, The Good Assassin and The Coldest Warrior, are available from No Exit Press.

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