Acts of love and war

Summary/Review: "A remarkable story of love and sacrifice centred on three young English volunteers in the bloody Spanish Civil War, from the author of The Prisoner's Wife. 1936. Civil war is tearing Spain apart, and the world is on the brink of chaos... Twenty-one-year-old Lucy is frustrated with her constrained life in Hertfordshire, teaching and keeping house for her domineering father. But she is content to keep living next door to Tom and Jamie, two brothers she has grown up with since childhood, and for whom she holds equal deep affection. But everyone's lives are turned upside down when Tom, the younger, decides to join the Republican cause in the bloody war in Spain. His older, fervently Catholic brother Jamie soon follows--but as a reporter for the forces that support General Franco in keeping Spain rigidly authoritarian, with the help of both Hitler and Mussolini. Lucy decides the only way to ensure the brothers' safety is to defy her father and travel to Spain herself and persuade them to come home. Yet when she sees the horrific effects of the war on the people--especially the children--she quickly joins the lifesaving work of the Quaker volunteers who have arrived from as many countries as have the International Brigades of fighters. Lucy also realizes that both brothers are in love with her; she herself is deeply torn. The atrocities and casualties mount and Lucy knows that the question of which man she might spend her life with might be irrelevent, as the chances of either of them surviving diminish with every passing day. This meticulously researched, deeply affecting novel is based on real letters and diaries from the Spanish Civil War. Both a love story and a tribute to the remarkable women who fought with compassion and bravery to save the innocent victims of a war that was just a foretaste of the carnage soon to come in World War II."--