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| 📕10-word summary: Nurse creates opportunity for potential last words to loved ones. 🖌6-word review: Compelling dual timeline — ultimately heartwarming — story. |
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| 💭Compelling quote: “She was suffering terribly, and you did the best thing for her. This is a war, and any man on the battlefield would have done the same thing.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: maisonette, hob, Luftwaffe, Primus, cagoule, swifts, biro, chivvying, trundling, naff, welly | |||||||||
| Description: London, 1940: When nurse Elsie offers to send a reassuring letter to the family of a patient, she has an idea. She begins a book of last letters: messages to be sent on to wounded soldiers’ loved ones should the very worst come to pass, so that no one is left without a final goodbye. But one message will change Elsie’s life forever. When a patient makes a devastating request, can Elsie find the strength to do the unthinkable? London, present day: Stephanie has people she’d like to speak to: her estranged, incarcerated brother; her nan, whose dementia means she’s only occasionally lucid enough to talk. When she discovers a book of wartime letters, Stephanie realises the importance of our final words – and uncovers the story of a secret love, a desperate choice, and the unimaginable courage of the woman behind it all.* *From goodreads.com’s synopsis. |
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| Thoughts: I read about this book on BookBub and it was available for a $.99 download. Since I had a credit for that amount, I “bought it” at no out-of-pocket expense. I appreciated that this was one of those dual-timeline stories in which both the present-day storyline and the in-the-past storyline were both good. Other than the aspect of “the nurse and the airman” communicating in “the book” in a couple of pages that were “purposefully stuck together to keep them private” being totally implausible, it was a believable and compelling story. I was completely sucked into it, and I looked forward to picking it back up as soon as possible and pretty much zipped through it. YMMV, of course. | |||||||||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.