The Last Lifeboat

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Inspired by a remarkable true story, a young teacher evacuates children to safety across perilous waters, in a moving and triumphant new novel from New York Times bestselling author Hazel Gaynor.

1940, Kent Alice King is not brave or daring--she's happiest finding adventure through the safe pages of books. But times of war demand courage, and as the threat of German invasion looms, a plane crash near her home awakens a strength in Alice she'd long forgotten. Determined to do her part, she finds a role perfectly suited to her experience as a schoolteacher--to help evacuate Britain's children overseas.

1940, London Lily Nichols once dreamed of using her mathematical talents for more than tabulating the cost of groceries, but life, and love, charted her a different course. With two lively children and a loving husband, Lily's humble home is her world, until war tears everything asunder. With her husband gone and bombs raining down, Lily is faced with an impossible choice: keep her son and daughter close, knowing she may not be able to protect them, or enroll them in a risky evacuation scheme, where safety awaits so very far away.

When a Nazi U-boat torpedoes the S. S. Carlisle carrying a ship of children to Canada, a single lifeboat is left adrift in the storm-tossed Atlantic. Alice and Lily, strangers to each other--one on land, the other at sea--will quickly become one another's very best hope as their lives are fatefully entwined.

ISBN-13: 9780593440315

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Berkley Books

Publication Date: 06-13-2023

Pages: 384

Product Dimensions: 8.00h x 5.15w x 1.00d

Hazel Gaynor is an award-winning, New York Times, USA Today, Irish Times, and international bestselling author. Her most recent historical novel, set in China during WWII--published in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand as The Bird in the Bamboo Cage and in the USA and Canada as When We Were Young & Brave--was an Irish Times bestseller, a national bestseller in the USA, and was short-listed for the 2020 Irish Book Awards.