June 1940, Paris. For days she’s seen the flashes in the night sky. She’s heard the drone of planes and the thump of marching boots. Doors shut as the German flag billows over the Eiffel Tower. Leaving Cora just one last chance to get her letter out of Paris…
The Nazi occupation has begun, and soldiers stand guard on every corner. The terrifying threat of war hangs in the air, and whispers of an unimaginable death toll roll across Europe. But Cora Mayhew has come to Paris from America to search for her birth mother – a fine silver locket her only clue – and she refuses to give up now.
One winter day, the air thick with fog, Cora is on a train – praying that it will lead her to the mother she never knew. But when the train is struck by bombs, throwing her from her seat as the carriage lurches off the tracks, all she can think about is everything she’s left behind.
Bruised and gasping for air, Cora struggles to her feet, shaking glass from her hair. Surrounded by passengers taking their last breaths and crying out for their loved ones, Cora knows she must find a way to send a heart-wrenching letter she’s been carrying around for weeks and return to her dear adoptive family while she still can.
Staggering from the wreckage, Cora shelters in a nearby ditch. But as the cold sets into her bones and her fighting spirit slips away, a German soldier finds Cora and offers her a chance at escape… With golden-flecked hazel eyes, handsome Max Heller is everything a Nazi shouldn’t be: kind, good-humoured and selfless.
With Max’s help, Cora uncovers a devastating secret about her birth mother, which makes her even more determined to get home. The key to Cora’s safe journey lies in the letter she’s been trying desperately to get out of Paris. Now she is faced with a choice: place her trust in the hands of the enemy, or go it alone and risk never making it out alive?
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About the Author
Kate Eastham trained as a nurse in the late 1970s and enjoyed a long career before a change in circumstance meant that she needed to be a full time carer for her partner. Determined to make the most of this new role ‘working from home’ she cleared a space at the kitchen table for a pile of books and a writing pad and started to make notes on the history of nursing. Inspired by the achievements of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole during the Crimean War she was also captured by the sheer grit and determination of other ‘ordinary women’ whose voices from the past are seldom heard. An idea for a novel was born and her first book, ‘Miss Nightingale’s Nurses’, was published by Penguin in 2018, closely followed by three more in the series.
Having thought that she would never find anything to replace the work in nursing that she loved, she is now equally immersed in her writing, drawing on years of experience and the stories told by so many patients. With her passion for history, Kate aims to continue making visible the lives of ordinary yet extraordinary women from the past.
Her current fiction is set during the World Wars and will be published by Bookouture.
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Author Link
Twitter: @eastham_kate
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Book Link
Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Letter-Paris-absolutely-heartbreaking-ebook/dp/B0BM9X7X58/
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