The Nightingale

by Kristin Hannah Narrated by Polly Stone

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A sweeping journey that will captivate you from the very first page, The Nightingale is a tale of love and loss, set against the backdrop of World War II. Hannah reframes the experience of war from the words of women, and we meet characters inherently good and some shockingly evil: "In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are."

A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK

A #1 New York Times bestseller, Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year, and soon to be a major motion picture, this unforgettable novel of love and strength in the face of war has enthralled a generation.

With courage, grace, and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah captures the epic panorama of World War II and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women's war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France-a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime.

Goodreads Best Historical Novel of the Year ¿ People's Choice Favorite Fiction Winner ¿ #1 Indie Next Selection ¿ A Buzzfeed and The Week Best Book of the Year

Praise for The Nightingale:

"Haunting, action-packed, and compelling." -Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author

"Absolutely riveting!...Read this book." -Dr. Miriam Klein Kassenoff, Director of the University of Miami Holocaust Teacher Institute

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Audio

04/27/2015
Two very different sisters navigate life in WWII France in this sweeping story: Isabelle, an impetuous 18-year-old who is eager to defy the Nazis, and her much older and more traditional sister Vianne, who tries valiantly to keep home and hearth together. Reader Stone’s strength lies in the emotional range she brings to her characters—not just the two sisters, but also their jaded, detached father, and even Vianne’s small daughter, who grows up markedly during the war. Stone approaches the performance with an intuitive understanding of the characters’ private fears, knowing that their inner lives are often quite different than their public faces, and that a good deal goes unsaid between them. She also performs an excellent French accent. But rather than trying to carry it through all of the conversations between the French characters, which would be tedious over the course of the novel, she wisely reserves it for names and places. However, the voice she employs for Captain Beck, a German officer billeted at Vianne’s house, is stereotyped, and other international inflections—British, Eastern European—fall flat. A St. Martin’s hardcover. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

Praise for The Nightingale:

"Haunting, action-packed, and compelling." —Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author

"Absolutely riveting!...Read this book." —Dr. Miriam Klein Kassenoff, Director of the University of Miami Holocaust Teacher Institute

"Beautifully written and richly evocative." —Sara Gruen, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“A hauntingly rich WWII novel about courage, brutality, love, survival—and the essence of what makes us human.” —Family Circle

“A heart-pounding story.” —USA Today

"An enormous story. Richly satisfying. I loved it." —Anne Rice

"A respectful and absorbing page-turner." —Kirkus Reviews

"Tender, compelling...a satisfying slice of life in Nazi-occupied France." —Jewish Book Council

“Expect to devour The Nightingale in as few sittings as possible; the high-stakes plot and lovable characters won’t allow any rest until all of their fates are known.” —Shelf Awareness

"I loved The Nightingale." —Lisa See, #1 New York Times bestselling author

"Powerful...an unforgettable portrait of love and war." —People

Sara Gruen

A beautifully written and richly evocative examination of life, love, and the ravages of war, and the different ways people react to unthinkable situations-not to mention the terrible and mounting toll of keeping secrets. This powerhouse of a story is equally packed with action and emotion, and is sure to be another major hit.

Dr. Miriam Klein Kassenoff

I found The Nightingale absolutely riveting! I started reading it one night after supper with every intention of reading just a few chapters for that evening and could not put it down. Not only is it an emotionally inspiring story with well-drawn characters whom you grow to care about deeply, but it is also historically informative....Read this book. It will keep you guessing throughout about the two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, both brave young women who did what they thought was the right thing to do in the most of difficult circumstances. They had--in the words of Lawrence Langer the WW2 historian scholar too often to make 'choiceless choices.'

Marilyn Dahl

I read The Nightingale in one sitting, completely transported to wartime France, completely forgetting where I was. A historical novel-built on Kristin Hannah's proven skill with story, complex and enduring family ties, and passion-one that will captivate readers.

Christina Baker Kline

In this epic novel, set in France in World War II, two sisters who live in a small village find themselves estranged when they disagree about the imminent threat of occupation. Separated by principles and temperament, each must find her own way forward as she faces moral questions and life-or-death choices. Haunting, action-packed, and compelling.

Lisa See

I loved Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale. She has captured a particular slice of French life during World War II with wonderful details and drama. But what I loved most about the novel was the relationship between the two sisters and Hannah's exploration of what we do in moments of great challenge. Do we rise to the occasion or fail? Are we heroes or cowards? Are we loyal to the people we love most or do we betray them? Hannah explores these questions with probing finesse and great heart.

Director of the University of Miami Holocaust Teac too often to make ‘choiceless choices.'" –Dr. Miriam Klein Kassenoff

I found The Nightingale absolutely riveting! I started reading it one night after supper with every intention of reading just a few chapters for that evening and could not put it down. Not only is it an emotionally inspiring story with well-drawn characters whom you grow to care about deeply, but it is also historically informative….Read this book. It will keep you guessing throughout about the two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, both brave young women who did what they thought was the right thing to do in the most of difficult circumstances. They had--in the words of Lawrence Langer the WW2 historian scholar

#1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Tra Christina Baker Kline

In this epic novel, set in France in World War II, two sisters who live in a small village find themselves estranged when they disagree about the imminent threat of occupation. Separated by principles and temperament, each must find her own way forward as she faces moral questions and life-or-death choices. Haunting, action-packed, and compelling.

#1 New York Times bestseller author of Snow Flower Lisa See

I loved Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale. She has captured a particular slice of French life during World War II with wonderful details and drama. But what I loved most about the novel was the relationship between the two sisters and Hannah's exploration of what we do in moments of great challenge. Do we rise to the occasion or fail? Are we heroes or cowards? Are we loyal to the people we love most or do we betray them? Hannah explores these questions with probing finesse and great heart.

Library Journal - Audio

05/15/2015
Hannah's (Fly Away) latest begins with an old woman recalling her past. This unnamed woman intrudes occasionally throughout the book, disrupting the horrific tale of two sisters in World War II France. Thus, listeners learn that one sister survives the war—but which one? In 1939, Vianne, the older sibling, wants to believe that everything is for the best and refuses to see reality. Isabelle sees the situation more clearly, but she alienates Vianne (and many others) by saying exactly what she thinks and acting without considering the consequences. The sisters make very different and difficult choices as they deal with the German occupation. The final scene at a Paris reunion of war survivors shows how their choices influenced history and makes for a most satisfying conclusion. Polly Stone employs German, French, American, and British accents and perfect pacing to bring the listener fully into the period and action. Timid Vianne's slower pacing and higher pitch contrast with the forcefulness that characterizes Isabelle. Stone's dramatic choices heighten the danger, suspense, and tragedy. VERDICT Highly recommended. ["Readers who enjoy stories with ethical dilemmas and character-driven fiction will enjoy this story full of emotion and heart": LJ 1/15 review of the St. Martin's hc.]—Juleigh Muirhead Clark, Colonial Williamsburg Fdn. Lib., VA

Library Journal

01/01/2015
Character growth and development is a strength of this World War II-set novel, although the middle plods during some sections. Sisters Vianne and Isabelle Mauriac are driven apart by unhealed childhood wounds and clashing personalities. When Isabelle is kicked out of boarding school for the umpteenth time for "rebellious" behavior, her embittered veteran father, in the midst of drowning his own battle scars in bourbon, sends the adolescent to her elder sister's house. Meanwhile, Vianne attempts to find salvation from her past by marrying her teenage sweetheart and relocating to the French countryside where she delights in her garden and her school-age daughter. As Hitler's forces invade, both sisters face challenging choices that will show where their loyalties lie. VERDICT Hannah (Summer Island; Firefly Lane) has long been a staple of women's fiction. Readers who enjoy stories with ethical dilemmas and character-driven narratives will enjoy this novel full of emotion and heart. [See Prepub Alert, 8/11/14.]—Julia M. Reffner, Midlothian, VA

JANUARY 2015 - AudioFile

Narrator Polly Stone gives voice to this incredible story of women’s lives in France during WWII. Sisters Vianne and Isabelle are complete opposites. Vianne, the older, is settled with a family of her own and a husband away at war, while Isabelle is full of fire and wants to fight for France. Stone’s even delivery gives an eerie feel to a story that has a lot of action and activity as it alternates between the point of view of Vianne and that of Isabelle. While the dialogue for each sister is very different—calmer and sweeter for Vianne and more passionate and clipped for Isabelle—Stone’s voices sound similar, making it difficult at times to know that the point of view has changed. A strength of the narration is that Stone’s French accents add authenticity and a sense of place to her reading. E.N. 2016 Audies Winner © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2014-11-20
Hannah's new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie's adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann's land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle's outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann's journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah's proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171806729
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	02/03/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	200,064

Read an Excerpt

ONE

April 9, 1995

The Oregon Coast

If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are. Today’s

young people want to know everything about everyone. They think talking

about a problem will solve it. I come from a quieter generation. We

understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention.

Lately, though, I find myself thinking about the war and my past, about

the people I lost.

Lost.

It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones; perhaps I left them

where they don’t belong and then turned away, too confused to retrace

my steps.

They are not lost. Nor are they in a better place. They are gone. As I

approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into

our DNA and remains forever a part of us.

I have aged in the months since my husband’s death and my diagnosis.

My skin has the crinkled appearance of wax paper that someone has tried

to flatten and reuse. My eyes fail me often— in the darkness, when headlights

flash, when rain falls. It is unnerving, this new unreliability in my

vision. Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a

clarity I can no longer see in the present.

I want to imagine there will be peace when I am gone, that I will see all

of the people I have loved and lost. At least that I will be forgiven.

I know better, though, don’t I?

My house, named The Peaks by the lumber baron who built it over a hundred

years ago, is for sale, and I am preparing to move because my son

thinks I should.

He is trying to take care of me, to show how much he loves me in this

most difficult of times, and so I put up with his controlling ways. What do

I care where I die? That is the point, really. It no longer matters where I

live. I am boxing up the Oregon beachside life I settled into nearly fifty

years ago. There is not much I want to take with me. But there is one

thing.

I reach for the hanging handle that controls the attic steps. The stairs

unfold from the ceiling like a gentleman extending his hand.

The flimsy stairs wobble beneath my feet as I climb into the attic, which

smells of must and mold. A single, hanging lightbulb swings overhead. I pull

the cord.

It is like being in the hold of an old steamship. Wide wooden planks

panel the walls; cobwebs turn the creases silver and hang in skeins from

the indentation between the planks. The ceiling is so steeply pitched that

I can stand upright only in the center of the room.

I see the rocking chair I used when my grandchildren were young, then

an old crib and a ratty- looking rocking horse set on rusty springs, and the

chair my daughter was refinishing when she got sick. Boxes are tucked

along the wall, marked “Xmas,” “Thanksgiving,” “Easter,” “Halloween,”

“Serveware,” “Sports.” In those boxes are the things I don’t use much anymore

but can’t bear to part with. For me, admitting that I won’t decorate a

tree for Christmas is giving up, and I’ve never been good at letting go.

Tucked in the corner is what I am looking for: an ancient steamer trunk

covered in travel stickers.

With effort, I drag the heavy trunk to the center of the attic, directly

beneath the hanging light. I kneel beside it, but the pain in my knees is

piercing, so I slide onto my backside.

For the first time in thirty years, I lift the trunk’s lid. The top tray is full

of baby memorabilia. Tiny shoes, ceramic hand molds, crayon drawings

populated by stick figures and smiling suns, report cards, dance recital

pictures.

I lift the tray from the trunk and set it aside.

The mementos in the bottom of the trunk are in a messy pile: several

faded leather- bound journals; a packet of aged postcards, tied together

with a blue satin ribbon; a cardboard box, bent in one corner; a set of slim

books of poetry by Julien Rossignol; and a shoebox that holds hundreds of

black- and- white photographs.

On top is a yellowed, faded piece of paper.

My hands are shaking as I pick it up. It is a carte d’identité, an identity

card, from the war. I see the small, passport- sized photo of a young

woman. Juliette Gervaise.

“Mom?”

I hear my son on the creaking wooden steps, footsteps that match my

heartbeats. Has he called out to me before?

“Mom? You shouldn’t be up here. Shit. The steps are unsteady.” He

comes to stand beside me. “One fall and—”

I touch his pant leg, shake my head softly. I can’t look up. “Don’t” is all

I can say.

He kneels, then sits. I can smell his aftershave, something subtle and

spicy, and also a hint of smoke. He has sneaked a cigarette outside, a habit

he gave up de cades ago and took up again at my recent diagnosis. There

is no reason to voice my disapproval: He is a doctor. He knows better.

My instinct is to toss the card into the trunk and slam the lid down,

hiding it again. It’s what I have done all my life.

Now I am dying. Not quickly, perhaps, but not slowly, either, and I feel

compelled to look back on my life.

“Mom, you’re crying.”

“Am I?”

I want to tell him the truth, but I can’t. It embarrasses and shames me,

this failure. At my age, I should not be afraid of anything— certainly not

my own past.

I say only, “I want to take this trunk.”

“It’s too big. I’ll repack the things you want into a smaller box.”

I smile at his attempt to control me. “I love you and I am sick again. For

these reasons, I have let you push me around, but I am not dead yet. I want

this trunk with me.”

“What can you possibly need in it? It’s just our artwork and other junk.”

If I had told him the truth long ago, or had danced and drunk and sung

more, maybe he would have seen me instead of a dependable, ordinary

mother. He loves a version of me that is incomplete. I always thought it was

what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be

known.

“Think of this as my last request.”

I can see that he wants to tell me not to talk that way, but he’s afraid his

voice will catch. He clears his throat. “You’ve beaten it twice before. You’ll

beat it again.”

We both know this isn’t true. I am unsteady and weak. I can neither

sleep nor eat without the help of medical science. “Of course I will.”

“I just want to keep you safe.”

I smile. Americans can be so naïve.

Once I shared his optimism. I thought the world was safe. But that was

a long time ago.

“Who is Juliette Gervaise?” Julien says and it shocks me a little to hear

that name from him.

I close my eyes and in the darkness that smells of mildew and bygone

lives, my mind casts back, a line thrown across years and continents.

Against my will— or maybe in tandem with it, who knows anymore?— I

remember.

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