About the Book
1940, Kent: Alice King is not brave or daring — she’s happiest finding adventure through the safe pages of books. But times of war demand courage, and as the threat of German invasion looms, a plane crash near her home awakens a strength in Alice she’d long forgotten. Determined to do her part, she finds a role perfectly suited to her experience as a schoolteacher — to help evacuate Britain’s children overseas.
1940, London: Lily Nichols once dreamed of using her mathematical talents for more than tabulating the cost of groceries, but life, and love, charted her a different course. With two lively children and a loving husband, Lily’s humble home is her world, until war tears everything asunder. With her husband gone and bombs raining down, Lily is faced with an impossible choice: keep her son and daughter close, knowing she may not be able to protect them, or enroll them in a risky evacuation scheme, where safety awaits so very far away.
When a Nazi U-boat torpedoes the S. S. Carlisle carrying a ship of children to Canada, a single lifeboat is left adrift in the storm-tossed Atlantic. Alice and Lily, strangers to each other — one on land, the other at sea — will quickly become one another’s very best hope as their lives are fatefully entwined.
Format: eARC (368 pages) Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 8th June 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction
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My Review
The Last Lifeboat is inspired by the true story of the sinking of the SS City of Benares, a ship carrying child evacuees from England to supposed safety in Canada in September 1940.
Opening with a dramatic scene in the aftermath of the torpedoing of the ship (named the SS Carlisle for the purposes of the novel) by a German U-boat, the book follows a small group of people, including a number of children, who find themselves adrift in a lifeboat. Amongst the group is Alice King, a young teacher acting as one of the escorts to the evacuees, and the lone woman in the lifeboat. Over the next few days, we follow them as they encounter storms, endure hunger and thirst, and are gradually weakened by exposure to the elements. The scenes are so vividly imagined that you really do feel you are experiencing it all alongside them. As their hopes of rescue begin to fade, their experience becomes one of grim endurance and a daily struggle to survive that takes a mental and physical toll.
For Alice, delivering the children entrusted to her care to safety becomes a personal mission, something to cling to during the dark times, and one for which she is prepared to sacrifice herself if necessary. ‘Buoyed by the bright morning, she gathers up the tattered fragments of hope the storm had torn from her in the night, and stitches them together into a patchwork of determination and belief; a blanket of courage big enough to cover them all.’
Alternating with the dramatic and absolutely gripping scenes aboard the lifeboat, we witness the anguish of the recently widowed Lily who made the difficult – and lonely – decision to place her son and daughter aboard the ship thinking this was the way to keep them safe from the increasingly heavy bombing raids on London. It turns out to be anything but. When news of the disaster is made public, she remains determined not to give up hope that her children may have survived or to stop pressing the authorities to continue the search for that last lifeboat.
Like the author’s earlier book, The Bird in the Bamboo Cage, The Last Lifeboat shines a spotlight on the courageous exploits of women in wartime. But it doesn’t ignore the ‘ordinary’ women, those women described as ‘the quiet essential backbone of the war on the home front’. There are some interesting male characters in the book and I liked the fact that they display a heroism that is rooted in moral principles.
There are emotional scenes towards the end of the book and if you can read them without reaching for the tissues then you must have a heart of stone. Personally, I would have been happy for the book to end at the final chapter with its moving last paragraph. However, the epilogue’s message that relationships formed in times of disaster may have enduring bonds is an uplifting one.
The Last Lifeboat is an utterly immersive story that is at times heartbreaking. It also demonstrates, as if we needed reminding, of the horror of war and its indiscriminate nature. At one point a character asks, ‘What on earth are we doing to each other?’ But what also shines through is the resilience of the human spirit.
In three words: Emotional, dramatic, moving
Try something similar: The Bird in the Bamboo Cage by Hazel Gaynor
About the Author
Hazel Gaynor is an award-winning New York Times, USA Today and Irish Times bestselling author of historical fiction, including her debut The Girl Who Came Home for which she received the 2015 RNA Historical Novel of the Year award. The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter was shortlisted for the 2019 HWA Gold Crown award. She is published in thirteen languages and nineteen countries. Originally from Yorkshire, Hazel lives in Ireland with her family.
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