The phenomenal new novel of resilience and survival from bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Heather Morris. In the midst of WWII, an English mother, Norah, places her eight-year-old daughter Sally on a ship leaving Malaya, desperate to keep her safe from the Japanese army as they move down through the Pacific, swiftly overrunning the Allied forces. Norah then flees, knowing she may never see her child again. In Singapore, a Welsh-Australian nurse, Nesta, has enlisted to tend to Allied troops. But as the island falls to the Japanese she joins the terrified cargo of people, including the heartbroken Norah, crammed aboard the Vyner Brooke merchant ship. Only two days later, they are bombarded from the air off the coast of Indonesia, and in a matter of hours, the Vyner Brooke lies broken on the seabed. After surviving a brutal 24 hours in the sea, Nesta and Norah reach the beaches of an Indonesian island, only to be captured by the Japanese and held in one of their notorious
