Love and duty, codes and spies…
Kent 1939 Soon to marry her childhood sweetheart, Eliza thinks her life is set. But when war breaks out, everything changes and, while helping the soldiers returning from Dunkirk, she bumps into Lewis, an unforgettable stranger from her past.
Eliza’s in-laws’ country home becomes a cell for code breakers receiving messages from the French Resistance, with Eliza as translator. When Lewis is assigned to head up the team, the pair fall dangerously in love. But with the enemy watching across the Channel and rumours of spies in their midst, Eliza is torn between passion and duty.
When Lewis flies across the Channel on a secret mission, Eliza wonders if she'll ever see him again. Can she live with the terrible secret they share?
First published in 2016 as Map of Stars
The Code Breaker’s Secret (as Map of Stars) was shortlisted for
the Romantic Novelists Association Historical Novel award 2017.
The Code Breaker’s Secret has been translated into German as Sterne Uber Dunklen Wegen (Weltbild).
Eliza’s present shifted bluntly to the past, to the time when she had been loved deeply, passionately, utterly.
To that dangerous, glorious time when guilt and desire had caught her in chains of equal length.
She was told never to speak of it.
Reviews for The Code Breaker’s Secret
“The Code Breaker’s Secret is an emotional story about what it feels like to lose, to love and to hold on no matter what happens. I absolutely loved this novel and highly recommend it. It’s a true gem and is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.”
“A touching tale of star-crossed lovers. Nothing beats old-school wartime romance.”
“This book has everything that a reader could want. A touch of forbidden love mixed with thrilling wartime espionage and secret codes.”
Between the lines
Discover the story behind The Code Breaker’s Secret
Breaking the code
I have known and loved the Isle of Thanet – that triangle of land (no longer an island) at the eastern tip of Kent – for half a lifetime. It always felt like my second home, so much so that in 2014, I left the hills of Buckinghamshire to settle ten minutes from the sea at Margate; it felt like a homecoming. And, already, The Code Breaker’s Secret was taking shape, the germ of the idea creeping up on me like a spy.
Kent has ancient roots, sleepy charm, orchards and hop gardens, the sea lapping at its toes. You can stand on the cliffs at Dover and see France in the haze across a stretch of water that looks, in some lights, entirely swimmable. I became fascinated by what it must have been like to live here during the Second World War, in plain sight of the enemy, under the flight path of the bombers heading for London, with the Battle of Britain fought in the summer skies overhead.
I read a local news report about a mummified homing pigeon trapped in a Kentish chimney, complete with war-time message strapped to its leg. So far, so intriguing. I dug around to discover that, during the war, pigeons were taken on every mission leaving our airfields, so if the crew were shot down, the pigeons would be used to send home their co-ordinates. Carrier pigeons were also dropped from planes – secure in little boxes with parachutes – over the French countryside with messages for the Resistance. By now, my mind was racing.
I also stumbled across little-known details about our very own British Resistance: top-secret guerrilla fighters dotted around rural Kent and Sussex – Dad’s Army with bells on. They used a network of foxholes, secreting themselves ready to scupper the German invasion. They had code names like Swede, Onion and Stoat. I was hooked.
In the Summer of Love 1967, my heroine Eliza and her 24-year-old daughter Stella pluck a mummified bird from soot that falls down the chimney of their Elizabethan home, Forstall Manor, deep in the Kent countryside. Attached to the pigeon’s leg is a note written on a coded war-time document (the ‘map of stars’); it’s a desperate scribbled message for Eliza from her lover Lewis, delivered more than twenty years too late.
I take you straight back to Eliza newly married to childhood sweetheart Nicholas; when Forstall Manor, commandeered by the War Office, is buzzing with Morse code; when talk is of rations, spies and invasion; when Eliza struggles with her loyalty to her husband, obligation to her country and her secret love for Lewis.
Stella delves into her parents’ dangerous war-time days and inadvertently uncovers, along with painful memories of loss and sacrifice, another of Eliza’s terrible secrets. How can Eliza live with her truth…?
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