The Nightingale

Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale, published in 2015, is set in France in the years just before the Second World War began, and follows two sisters who have been estranged from each other and from their father. Vianne Mauriac is the elder, a married schoolteacher raising her eight-year-old daughter, and her answer to the German occupation is to stay where she is and try to keep her household and her daughter fed. Isabelle Rossignol takes the other path and joins the resistance, working on escape routes for Allied airmen who have been shot down over occupied territory.

The novel carries that material inside a frame: the book opens in 1995 with an elderly woman living off the coast of Oregon, looking back on what she and her sister did, and her first-person recollections surround the main narrative, which is told in the third person. The book was inspired by the Belgian resistance worker Andree de Jongh, who worked on getting downed Allied pilots out of occupied Europe.

The two women answer the occupation in opposite ways, and the novel sets one sister's effort to hold a household and a child together against the other's work on the escape line, with the 1995 frame making clear that both are being weighed long after the events. The book was published by St. Martin's Press in 2015.