In 1942, Charlotte Gray, a scottish woman, goes to Occupied France on a dual mission: to perform an apparently simple errand for any British unique oeprations group also to search for her lover, an English airman who has gone missing in action. In the tiny city of Lavaurette, Sebastian Faulks presents a microcosm of France and its agony in ‘the dark years’. This is actually the full selection of collaboration, in the tacit to the enthusistic, aswell as types of incredible courage and altruism. Through the local resistance chief Julien, Charlotte fits his father, a Jewish painter whose motivation offers failed him.

In a series of shocking narrative climaxes in which the full extent of French collusion in the Nazi holocaust is delineated, Faulks provides the storyplot to an answer of redemptive like. In the delicacy of its writing, the intimacy of its characterisation and its own powerful narrative scenes of harrowing public events, Charlotte Gray is a valuable successor to Birdsong.