The Last Lifeboat by Hazel Gaynor
Synopsis
Inspired by a remarkable true story, a young teacher evacuates children to safety across perilous waters, in a moving and triumphant new novel from New York Times bestselling author Hazel Gaynor.
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.
Reviews
‘Heart-wrenching . . . a story that needs to be remembered’ FERN BRITTON
‘Enthrallingly told . . . it’s extraordinary how despite everything hope for the future shines out’ RACHEL HORE
‘A journey into the worst hardships of war for two women . . . and yet throughout it is bathed in the warmth of love’ GILL PAUL
‘I loved this absorbing, heart-rending story and cared so much about the vivid, courageous characters. Superb storytelling’ TRACY REES
‘Gripping, devastating, tremendously moving . . . a tale of bravery and remarkable endurance, the kindness of strangers, and the power of hope’ JENNY ASHCROFT
About the Author
Hazel Gaynor is an award-winning, New York Times, USA Today, Irish Times, and international bestselling author. Her most recent historical novel, set in China during WWII--published in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand as The Bird in the Bamboo Cage and in the USA and Canada as When We Were Young & Brave--was an Irish Times bestseller, a national bestseller in the USA, and was short-listed for the 2020 Irish Book Awards.