The Nightingale

Two French sisters take opposite paths through the German occupation: Vianne, who stays in her village with a soldier billeted in her house and survives by degrees of compromise, and Isabelle, who joins the Resistance and leads downed airmen over the Pyrenees. Hannah wrote it out of the real record of women’s resistance work, and the novel’s insistence is that Vianne’s quieter endurance is its own form of courage.