The Glovemaker's War

The Glovemaker's War Synopsis

My novel tells the story of a French-British woman’s top-secret military mission to France in 1944. Disguised as a Parisian glovemaker, she serves as a courier for the Resistance and ultimately experiences tragedy. Seventy years later, she reveals her secret as a deathbed revelation to her granddaughter, whose own journey of self-discovery forms a parallel narrative, culminating in her quest to reunite her grandmother with her lost wartime love. The tale begins in Manhattan in 2016, where the granddaughter, GEORGINA, leads a carefree life as a socialite and career woman in her thirties, sharing a penthouse hotel suite with her mother after the breakdown of her parents’ marriage. While her mother ANGELA is away on a lavish singles cruise, Georgina receives a message that her grandmother, EVE, is in failing health in England. Georgina must go to her bedside. Annoyed that she has to fill in for her self-absorbed mum, Georgina embarks on what she thinks will be a short trip to help the grandmother she hardly knows. Instead, the trip changes her life. Arriving at the family glovemaking shop in Worcestershire, where her mother and grandmother both grew up, she discovers that her grandmother is close to death and wants to unburden herself of a secret: During the War, she was drafted by the British military into a spying program because of her language and glovemaking skills. Originally thrilled to help her country, she soon experienced the war’s atrocities, lost her best friend and mission partner in a Nazi attack, and lost the love of her life—a young Resistance fighter named LUC—during the chaos of the War’s last days. Pregnant with Luc’s child, and believing him dead, Eve returned to England heartbroken and officially bound to secrecy, and entered into an unhappy marriage. Georgina’s story is woven into her grandmother’s in alternating chapters, as she gradually becomes closer to her grandmother and discovers a nurturing nature she never knew she had. She also spends time reconnecting with her friend CAMILLA and her husband, MATT, who introduce Georgina to their newly single friend, PAUL, the founder of a genealogy startup. A charming but bumbling scientist, Paul is no match at first for Georgina’s brazenly flirtatious ways. But when Georgina enlists his help to find Luc in France, a bond soon forms between them, and Georgina realizes that she, too, has found love.