Night Sky

Clare Francis offers us a spellbinder, in a novel that combines the impeccably researched historical drama of a Europe caught up in the midst of the horrors of World War Two, and its peoples caught up in survival, stark fear and white hot passions. Ms Francis' principle characters give us three distinctly defined and completely different personalities: Julie Lecaux, a single mother-to-be of a fatherless child from England, trying to conceal her shame in France; Paul Vasson, a one time petty thief, now a Nazi collaborator specializing in infiltrating the French Resistance; and David Freymann a German-Jewish scientist with a secret that could turn the tides of war to Germany should the Third Reich ever find out. This magnificently monumental story is as broad in scope as it is intimate in detail, the length and breath of 631 pages can still but hardly contain it. This was Clare Frances' premier, debut work.