Today it's the last day, but a pleasure to take part in the BlogTour When We Fall By Carolyn Kirby.
Based on the Katyn massacre of 1940, When We Fall is a moving historical novel of three lives forever altered by one fatal choice.
Carolyn Kirby - 'All of the victims of the Katyn massacre were men, except, remarkably, for one woman. And when I discovered that this woman, Janina Lewandowska, was a pilot, I knew that the Polish experience would become the heart of my novel… The story I tell is fiction, but it is one that I could not have begun to imagine without the remarkable life and death of Janina Lewandowska'
April - May 2020 marks 80 years since the Katyn massacre and 10th April 2020 also marks the 10th anniversary of the airline crash that killed top Polish dignitaries on their way to Russia to commemorate the atrocity.
Carolyn Kirby is the author of The Conviction of Cora Burns which was longlisted for the Historical Writers’Association Debut Crown Award.
Before being a full-time writer, Carolyn worked in social housing and as a teacher. She has two grown-up daughters and lives with her husband in Oxfordshire.
Follow @novelcarolyn on Twitter, on Goodreads, on Amazon, Visit Carolynkirby.com, Buy When We Fall
About the book
England, 1943. Lost in fog, Air Transport Auxiliary pilot Vee Katchatourian is forced to make an emergency landing where she meets enigmatic RAF airman Stefan Bergel, and then can’t get him out of her mind.
In occupied Poland, Ewa Hartman hosts German officers in her father’s guest house, while secretly gathering intelligence for the Polish resistance. Mourning her lover, Stefan, who was captured by the
Soviets at the start of the war, Ewa is shocked to see him on the street one day.
Haunted by a terrible choice he made in captivity, Stefan asks Vee and Ewa to help him expose one of the darkest secrets of the war. But it is not clear where everyone’s loyalties lie until they are tested.
This is the story of Ewa, Vee and Stefan. Three people doing their part to win and survive the war, and reveal the dark secrets that have been hidden and used to fuel the anger towards the enemy.
Ewa is adjusting to her hometown being occupied by the Germans. She has been waiting for news from her lover, a prisoner of war courtesy of the Soviets. Vee is doing her part as a pilot for the Air Transport Auxiliary, and both women know Stefan Bergel. Stefan is a man scarred by his years as a prisoner and determined to make sure the world knows what happened to his comrades and who is responsible.
The propaganda machine of the Soviets was a very effective tool, as is the Russian one now, even in the 1940s. They didn't acknowledge or confirm their responsibility for the Katyn massacre until 1990. Instead they hid their atrocities alongside those of the Nazi regime - in plain sight. The NKVD were responsible for the deaths or rather executions of 22000 Polish military officers, police officers and intelligentisa. They were killed in a series of mass executions.
Polish intelligentsia were people arbitrarily identified as intelligence officers and imprisoned. I say arbitrarily, but they were men who held important positions in their communities. According to historians Stalin wanted to ensure any future Polish military power would struggle, due to a lack of leaders and talent. Sounds so rational and cold.
It's historical war fiction based on the true events of the Katyn massacre.
In a way Kirby shows us how so many lives became connected for the greater good and simultaneously also through unfathomable trauma. Bonds and tethers that remain throughout the years, regardless of which side they were on. This is what makes the ending of the book so perfectly imperfect.
It's another riveting read from Kirby.
Buy When We Fall at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: No Exit Press | pub date 7th May 2020 | Demy Paperback Original with flaps | eBook also available | £12.99. Buy at Amazon com.
Read my review of The Conviction of Cora Burns by Carolyn Kirby.
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