Operation Moonlight

In the house by the Thames where she has lived all her life Betty is waiting to celebrate her hundredth birthday. An event that is less to be anticipated than might be thought as memories of her past return with the painful clarity that comes with longevity.

For Betty these are memories of the nervous weeks before D Day when she was parachuted into occupied France as a SOE agent working with the resistance. A mission that involved a devastating betrayal and a heartrending choice that has shadowed the rest of her life.

Past and present clash when the return of her son from Australia and an invitation join the Centenarians Club threaten to bring long buried secrets out into the light. Supported by carer Tali, who has challenges of her own to face, Betty must make a choice no less difficult than the one she made on a moonless night more than seventy years earlier.

This is a novel that manages to be a heart-warming story about family, friendship and second chances and a genuinely thrilling account of the war as fought behind enemy lines. The latter is the result of meticulous research presenting the harsh realities of life in occupied Europe, a place where hunger could made collaboration a strategy for survival. Morrish also writes well about the stresses placed on members of SOE, training for what were all too often suicide missions about which they couldn’t tell even their closest family.

The present-day section of the book is equally well written, presenting well rounded and, mostly, likable characters grappling with convincing emotional problems and finding if not a gift-wrapped resolution, then at least the possibility of making progress.

The shelf of fiction about the war is so packed with novels, not all of them of high quality it can feel like there is nothing left to say. Books like Operation Moonlight are a reminder that there can be, if it is said well.