The Girl from Guernica
Author: Karen
Robards
ISBN: 9780778309963
Publication Date:
September 6, 2022
Publisher: MIRA
Book Summary:
New York Times bestselling author Karen Robards returns with a riveting story of intrigue, deception and bravery in the face of war, inspired by Picasso’s great masterpiece Guernica:
On an April day in 1937, the sky opens and fire rains down upon the small Spanish town of Guernica. Seventeen-year-old Sibi and her family are caught up in the horror. Griff, an American military attaché, pulls Sibi from the wreckage, and it’s only the first time he saves her life in a span of hours. When Germany claims no involvement in the attack, insisting the Spanish Republic was responsible, Griff guides Sibi to lie to Nazi officials. If she or her sisters reveal that they saw planes bearing swastikas, the gestapo will silence them—by any means necessary.
As war begins to rage across Europe, Sibi joins the underground resistance, secretly exchanging information with Griff. But as the scope of Germany’s ambitions becomes clear, maintaining the facade of a Nazi sympathizer becomes ever more difficult. And as Sibi is drawn deeper into a web of secrets, she must find a way to outwit an enemy that threatens to decimate her family once and for all.
Masterfully
rendered and vividly capturing one of the most notorious episodes in history,
The Girl from Guernica is an unforgettable testament to the bonds of family and
the courage of women in wartime.
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Teaser Excerpt:
April
25, 1937
To laugh and dance and live
in the teeth of whatever tragedies an uncaring fate threw in your path
was the Basque way.
The stories Sibi’s mother told, stories handed down through
generations of indomitable women, painted those defiant sufferers as heroes.
Sibi feared she was not the stuff of which such heroes were
made.
She was hungry. Her feet hurt. And she was afraid. Of those
things, afraid was the worst by far. She was so tired of being afraid.
A knot in her stomach. A tightness in her throat. A
prickle of unease sliding over her skin. Familiar sensations all, which did not
make their sudden onset feel any less dreadful. Sixteen-year-old Sibi—Sibil
Francesca Helinger—pushed back a wayward strand of coffee-brown hair that had
escaped from the heavy bun coiled at her nape and frowned out into the misty
darkness enshrouding the Calle Fernando el Católico. Her
pulse thrummed as she clung to the desperate hope that she was
not seeing what she thought she was. Since the fighting had moved close enough
so that the residents of this ancient village high in the western Pyrenees
could actually hear gunfire in the surrounding hills, fear had become her
all-too-frequent visitor. But this—this was different. This was because of
something that was happening now,
right before her eyes, in the wide, tree-lined street just beyond where she
stood watching the regular weekly celebration on the night before market day.
Have we left it too late? The thought made her mouth go dry.
“I want a sweet.” Five-year-old Margrit’s restless movement
beside her reclaimed her attention. Gripping the child’s hand tighter, Sibi
cast an impatient glance down.
“There’s no money for a sweet.” Or anything else, Sibi could
have added, but didn’t.
“But I want one.”
Round blue eyes in a cherubic face surrounded by gold ringlets stared
longingly at the squares of honey and almond turrón being hawked to the crowd by a woman bearing a tray of
them. The yeasty aroma of the pastry made Sibi’s stomach growl. For the last
few weeks, she and her mother had been rationing their diminishing resources by
skipping the evening meal so that the younger ones could eat.
“Ask Mama to buy you one later.”
Margrit’s warm little fingers—which Sibi kept a secure hold on
because, as angelic as the youngest of the four Helinger sisters looked, she
wasn’t—twitched in hers. “She won’t. You know she won’t. She’ll say she doesn’t
have any money, either.”
That was undoubtedly true. In fact, Sibi had only said it in
hopes of placating her little sister until their mother returned. Thinking
fast—Margrit had mostly outgrown tantrums, but not entirely—Sibi was just about
to come out with an alternate suggestion when thirteen-year-old Luiza jumped
in.
“You know we’re poor now, so stop being such a
baby.” Cross because she hadn’t been permitted to go to the cinema
with a group of her friends, Luiza spoke sharply. The thick,
straight, butterscotch blond hair she’d chopped to chin length herself the
night before—”Nobody has long hair anymore!” she’d wailed in the face of their
mother’s horror—had already lost its grip on the rag curls she’d forced into
it. She looked like she was wearing a thatch of broom straw on her head, but
Sibi was far too good a sister, and far too preoccupied at the moment, to point
that out.
“I don’t like being
poor.” Margrit’s lower lip quivered.
“None of us do.”
“I specially don’t
like—”
Luiza cut her off. “You’re whining. You know what Mama said
about whining.”
“I am not…”
A match flared in the street. Tuning her sisters out, Sibi focused
on what the brief incandescence revealed as it rose to light a cigarette—red tip glowing brightly—before
arcing like a tiny shooting star to the ground. Sibi looked beyond the cigarette
to the dark shape behind it. The dark shapes
behind it. She wasn’t mistaken.
Soldiers—their soldiers, the
loyalist Republicans, their uniforms unmistakable—poured into the street from
seemingly everywhere. And the numbers were increasing…
Her heartbeat quickened. Does
no one else see?
Biting down on her lower lip, she glanced around.
The crowd clapped and swayed to the rollicking music of the highly prized town
band and ate and danced and played games and— She concluded that no one else
did. The village leaders who were present appeared unaware: Father Esteban
talked to the woman behind the refreshment table as she ladled out a bowl of
spicy fish soup for him; His Honor the mayor played mus, the popular card game, with three friends; the Count of
Arana, the town’s most prominent citizen, stood with his arms crossed and a
stern gaze fixed on his fifteen-year-old daughter, Teresa,
as she walked away from him with her hand tucked into the arm
of… Emilio Aguire.
Sibi’s stomach gave an odd little flutter.
Watching them reminded her of just how much of an outsider she
was here in this quaint small town with its red-roofed white houses and narrow
cobbled streets. Emilio was her age, he was the handsomest boy in school and he
had been kind to her. She had hoped… But no. To hope for anything where he was
concerned was foolishness. She and her mother and sisters were only temporary
residents. She worked as a part-time waitress and her mother had worked in a
dress shop before being fired three weeks ago, when the shop owner’s husband
had displayed too much interest in her. And that, of course, had immediately
become a topic for much discussion among the town gossips whose gleeful
suspicions that the former Marina Diaitz, now Helinger, who had come home with
her children but without her husband, was a floozy were thus seemingly
confirmed. All those factors combined to put them near the bottom of the social
ladder in this place where the wealthy local aristocracy had been comfortably
in place for generations, and they, with their German father, would have been
outsiders, anyway. And Teresa was beautiful and rich and— Well, there it was,
foolishness.
She had no time for foolishness.
Glancing at those in her own party—Luiza and Margrit, and their
other sister Johanna, all bunched close around her, and their mother, Marina,
dancing merrily with the baker Antonio Batzar beneath the colored lights strung
above the makeshift dance floor in hopes of securing a scarce loaf of tomorrow
morning’s fresh bread—Sibi felt her heartbeat quicken.
Intent on their own concerns, they appeared oblivious to
anything else. As usual it was up to her, notorious as the family worrier, to
think about what might happen, to catch and make sense of what the rest of them
missed.
Tonight, it was that their soldiers, their last line of defense
against the surging rebel Nationalists, appeared to be coming together en masse
to slink like starving cats past the Sunday night festivities.
These were the same war-weary, battle-scarred troops that had
been camped out in the forested peaks surrounding the town since they had
fallen back after the savage attack on the neighboring village of Durango that
had brought the nine-month-old civil war as close as its ancient churches and
rambling streets. In the days since, thousands of panicking refugees had
flooded the town. The warships of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, commander in
chief of the rebel forces, had blockaded the Basque ports. Food had become
scarce: along with bread, milk and meat were almost impossible to obtain.
People were hungry, frightened. The war that had been safely on the other side
of the country had changed direction so fast that the residents of these
sleepy villages high above the Bay of Biscay had been caught unprepared. But
unprepared or not, in a new and terrifying offensive the newspapers were
calling the War of the North, the fighting was now rushing like a wave toward
their front door.
The soldiers were all that stood between them and the enemy
forces determined to destroy them. And the soldiers were leaving.
Author Bio:
Karen Robards is the New
York Times, USA
TODAY and Publishers
Weekly bestselling author of fifty novels and one novella. She
is the winner of six Silver Pen awards and numerous other awards.
SOCIAL:
Author Website: http://karenrobards.com/
TWITTER: @TheKarenRobards
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