The Girl Without a Name: Beautiful and heartbreaking World War 2 historical fiction
September 1940. As the bombs of the Blitz rain down on the East End of London, Ruby and Stevie are falling in love. United by a shocking experience when they were evacuees, brave sixteen-year-old Ruby believes she and Stevie are kindred spirits, and they find solace together surrounded by the bombed-out shells of London houses. But when Stevie is posted abroad, handsome and smart in his khaki uniform, Ruby can’t shake a sense of foreboding. As she waits desperately for letters with foreign stamps that never come, she begins to fear that he is lost forever…
August 2004. Billie rushes to her father Dick’s hospital bedside. A terrible stroke has robbed him of his speech and he is a shell of the man he was before. Billie holds his hand, hoping her presence will bring him peace. But when she finds a crumpled black and white photo in his wallet of a smiling dark-haired girl she doesn’t recognise, Dick frantically tries to talk. Billie knows this is important, and she must ask the questions her father cannot. All she has to go on is the name he is just able to mumble. Ruby.
How is Ruby, a lonely East End orphan with no family, connected to Billie’s beloved father? What dangerous things has Billie’s father seen and done that he never told her? Who is the frightened young boy behind the man she knows? And can Billie lay the ghosts of the past to rest, even if it means revealing the darkest secrets of her father’s life and breaking her own heart?