Sarah Rose - "D-Day Girls" - Monica Davey
“Gripping, queasily so: Spies, romance, Gestapo thugs, blown-up trains, courage, and treachery (lots of treachery)—and all of it true, all precisely documented. . . "—Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake
Sarah Rose discusses D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II. She will be joined in conversation by Monica Davey, Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion.
At 57th Street Books
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About the book: The dramatic, untold story of the extraordinary women recruited by Britain’s elite spy agency to help pave the way for Allied victory. In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was fighting. Believing that Britain was locked in an existential battle, Winston Churchill created a secret agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose spies were trained in everything from demolition to sharpshooting. Their job, he declared, was to “set Europe ablaze.” But with most men on the front lines, the SOE was forced to do something unprecedented: recruit women. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and families to become saboteurs in France. In D-Day Girls, Sarah Rose draws on recently declassified files, diaries, and oral histories to tell the thrilling story of three of these remarkable women. There’s Andrée Borrel, a scrappy and streetwise Parisian who blew up power lines with the Gestapo hot on her heels; Odette Sansom, an unhappily married suburban mother who saw the SOE as her ticket out of domestic life and into a meaningful adventure; and Lise de Baissac, a fiercely independent member of French colonial high society and the SOE’s unflappable “queen.” Together, they destroyed train lines, ambushed Nazis, plotted prison breaks, and gathered crucial intelligence—laying the groundwork for the D-Day invasion that proved to be the turning point in the war. Rigorously researched and written with razor-sharp wit, D-Day Girls is an inspiring story for our own moment of resistance: a reminder of what courage—and the energy of politically animated women—can accomplish when the stakes seem incalculably high.
About the author: Sarah Rose is the author of For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History. She has written for the Wall Street Journal, Outside, The Saturday Evening Post, and Men's Journal. In 2014, she was awarded a Lowell Thomas Prize in Travel Writing.
About the interlocutor: Monica Davey is the Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times, covering the Midwest. Before joining The Times, Ms. Davey worked at The Chicago Tribune from 1998 until 2003. She also wrote for The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, The Roanoke Times and World-News and at City News Bureau of Chicago, a wire service where she began her career. A Chicago native, Ms. Davey received a B.A. in linguistics from Brown University.
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