Isabelle, on the other hand, has been kicked out of the last of a long line of boarding schools and returns to Paris to live with her emotionally damaged, Great War veteran father.

Vianne tries to ignore the signs of war until faced with the reality of her husband Antoine’s military mobilization. It begins in a small village in the Loire Valley in August 1939 as France prepares for war. Much like Sarah’s Key, The Nightingale moves between the present and the past to tell its story. The use of two main characters also allows her to outline competing narratives that are familiar to scholars of wartime France: rural versus urban collaboration versus Resistance, forgetting versus remembering the war years. Kristin Hannah uses this as a literary tool to build suspense and provide an emotional ending to the tale of two sisters who followed different paths during the war. It is not until the end of the novel, however, that the reader learns whether the narrator is Vianne Mauriac, a married mother of a young daughter and small-town teacher, or her impulsive and much younger sister, Isabelle Rossignol (the last names provide a hint to who is the Nightingale). The book opens in 1995 with an elderly, terminally-ill woman reflecting on her life. It lacks the beautiful writing style of both Némirovsky and Doerr, but the author manages to capture some events and atmosphere of the war years that could spark classroom discussion. Hannah’s book is a bit sappier and more contrived than its predecessors and contains elements similar to the other works of fiction. The latest contribution to this wartime historical fiction wave is Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale, which weaves together the story of two sisters in wartime France. Starting with Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française (2006) and followed by Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key (2007) and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014), these novels all spent weeks on bestseller lists.

Within the last decade, a number of novels focusing on daily life in France under the Occupation have been published in English and have drawn the attention of a wide reading public. Fogg Missouri University of Science & Technology

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