Historical Fiction · Free kit
The Nightingale
Occupied France, 1939 to 1945: two Rossignol sisters, years and temperament apart, take different roads through the same war. Vianne Mauriac stays in the garden house at Carriveau with her daughter Sophie after her husband Antoine is taken prisoner, and learns what it costs to keep a child alive with German officers in the spare room. Isabelle, expelled and hungry to be useful, walks into the Resistance and becomes the Nightingale — the passeur who leads Allied airmen over the Pyrenees. Hannah braids their choices with a 1995 Oregon frame: an elderly woman, a trunk, an identity card that says Juliette Gervaise, and the question of which sister's war the people who love her were ever allowed to know.
“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”
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Plan your meeting
The Nightingale This or That
Answer in under three seconds. No wrong answers — only revealing ones.
1 / 40
Rapid fire (60 seconds)
Read these aloud as fast as the group can shout answers.
- 1. Garden house or Paris bookshop?
- 2. Hot chocolate at the table or Bitter coffee on a station platform?
- 3. Paper nightingale or False identity card?
- 4. Madeleines or A heel of baguette?
- 5. Oregon rain or Carriveau dust?
- 6. Attic trunk or Kitchen ledger?
- 7. Lavender on the table or A map of mountains?
- 8. Stay and ration or Walk and improvise?
- 9. The name people sing or The name on a school register?
- 10. One more crossing or One more winter in the same house?