From the New York Times bestselling author of Sold On A Monday―over a million copies sold!―comes a sweeping World War II tale of an illusionist whose recruitment by British intelligence sets her on a perilous, heartrending path.
THE WAYS WE HIDE
by Kristina McMorris
Sourcebooks, September 2022
As a little girl raised amid the hardships of Michigan’s Copper Country, Fenna Vos learned to focus on her own survival. That ability sustains her even now as the Second World War rages in faraway countries. Though she performs onstage as the assistant to an unruly escape artist, behind the curtain she’s the mastermind of their act. Ultimately, controlling her surroundings and eluding traps of every kind helps her keep a lingering trauma at bay.
Yet for all her planning, Fenna doesn’t foresee being called upon by British military intelligence. Tasked with designing escape aids to thwart the Germans, MI9 seeks those with specialized skills for a war nearing its breaking point. Fenna reluctantly joins the unconventional team as an inventor. But when a test of her loyalty draws her deep into the fray, she discovers no mission is more treacherous than escaping one’s past.
Inspired by stunning true accounts, THE WAYS WE HIDE is a gripping story of love and loss, the wars we fight―on the battlefields and within ourselves―and the courage found in unexpected places.
Kristina McMorris is a New York Times bestselling author of two novellas and six novels, including the runaway bestseller Sold on a Monday. Initially inspired by her grandparents’ WWII courtship letters, her works of fiction have garnered more than twenty national literary awards. Prior to her writing career, she owned a wedding-and-event planning company until she had far surpassed her limit of YMCA and chicken dances. She also worked as a weekly TV-show host for Warner Bros. and an ABC affiliate, beginning at age nine with an Emmy Award-winning program. A graduate of Pepperdine University, she lives near Portland, Oregon, where (ironically) she’s entirely deficient of a green thumb and doesn’t own a single umbrella.
Torn from his parents as a small child in the 1870s, Stephen Mzamane is picked by the Anglican church to train at the Missionary College in Canterbury and then returned to southern Africa’s Cape Colony to be a preacher. He is a brilliant success, but troubles stalk him: his unresolved relationship with his family and people, the condescension of church leaders towards their own native pastors, and That Woman-seen once in a photograph and never forgotten. And now he has to find his mother and take her a message that will break her heart. Stephen’s journey to his mother’s home proves decisive in resolving the contradictions that tear at his heart.
Belleville 1860: Lavender Fitch is a twenty-eightyear-old spinster, whose station in life is diminished after the death of her father, the local apothecary. Her only inheritance is the family house along with its extensive gardens. To make ends meet, Lavender resorts to selling flowers at the local market.
In early 1920s New York, during the height of the Victorian Gilded Age, when fortunes were made and most young women dreamt of the most eligible bachelor, Pandora Carmichael dreams of becoming a fashion designer and achieving the independency forbidden to women of the time. Her main impediment is that she does not belong to the right family.
Between the World Wars, the six Mitford sisters—each more beautiful, brilliant, and eccentric than the next—dominate the English political, literary, and social scenes. Though they’ve weathered scandals before, the family falls into disarray when Diana divorces her wealthy husband to marry a fascist leader and Unity follows her sister’s lead all the way to Munich, inciting rumors that she’s become Hitler’s mistress.