LIBERATION

During World War II, a scrappy Australian teenage runaway turns pampered bride, then Resistance agent and ruthless soldier in the French countryside.

“ ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t be like those other wives. The thought of hurting you is awful but so is the thought of letting those bastards win….’ Nancy twisted in her seat and hitched up her skirt so she could sit astride him. ‘Henry Fiocca, I fucking love you.’ ” In the less successful of two novels this year inspired by the amply decorated, famously high-spirited World War II heroine Nancy Wake (the other is Ariel Lawhon’s Code Name Hélène), the character emerges as a feisty foremother of Lisbeth Salander. While Wake’s liberal use of profanity is a historical fact, documented in her own autobiography and elsewhere, here it is deployed with anachronistic abandon. “Vagina, vagina, vagina,” shouts Nancy in her interview for a position with the British Strategic Operations Executive. “It’s a scien-fucking-tific term!” The facts of Wake’s war participation, working with the Resistance troops in the Auvergne, are dramatized in high-stakes scenes of battle, ambush, and betrayal. As in life, Nancy kills one man with her bare hands and others with a gun; she completes an epic bike ride that saves the day. But some aspects of this character’s behavior—her treatment of a gay radio operator comrade in arms (at first close friends, she later accuses him of “sticking [his] cock in every hole [he] can find”); her participation in a fireside blood ritual with a Resistance leader; other unpleasant interactions with the soldiers of the Maquis—seem to strike the wrong note. The first collaboration by American screenwriter Darby Kealey and British historical fiction author Imogen Robertson under the pseudonym Imogen Kealy, this novel is already being adapted into a feature film for Anne Hathaway.

We look forward to the movie.