Author:Caroline Moorehead
A moving and extraordinary book about courage and survival, friendship and endurance – a portrait of ordinary women who faced the horror of the holocaust together.
On an icy morning in Paris in January 1943, a group of 230 French women resisters were rounded up from the Gestapo detention camps and sent on a train to Auschwitz – the only train, in the four years of German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. Of the group, only 49 survivors would return to France.
Here is the story of these women – told for the first time. A Train in Winter is a portrait of ordinary people, of their bravery and endurance, and of the friendships that kept so many of them alive.
‘A story of stunning courage, generosity and hope’ Mail on Sunday
‘Serious and heartfelt...profound’ Sunday Times
This serious and heartfelt book does deliver on its promise of a tale of how female friendship "can make the difference between living and dying"... Profound
—— Brian Schofield , Sunday TimesA harrowing but also uplifting shared story of friendship, courage and endurance
—— IndependentA story of stunning courage, generosity and hope. They risked their lives to defeat Fascism, by printing subversive literature, hiding Jewish friends or, in the case of one girl, simply insulting a French youth because he had decided to co-operate with the Nazis. The price they paid for their bravery was terrible. A Train in Winter could have been a sad, almost morbid book. In Moorehead's expert hands it is a triumphant one
—— Kathryn Hughes , Mail on SundayCompassionate, meticulous and compulsively enthralling... This book is essential reading. The litany of names at the end, with their brief biographies (Yolande, Cecile, Poupette, Mitzy, Lucie...) reminds us weeping is not enough. It bears witness - and warns
—— Bel Mooney , Daily MailMoorehead tells her appalling story in measured prose that sets off perfectly the reader's growing sense of wonder that such heroism is possible
—— GuardianA remarkable and deeply affecting book
—— Oxford TimesA boom which contains a wealth of historical information as well as some brilliant if horrific storytelling
—— John Laughland , SpectatorA pitch-perfect study of human depravity, and of the heroism it can inspire
—— Maggie Fergusson , Intelligent LifeWith A Train in Winter [Caroline Moorehead] has managed to pay tribute and tell the women's compelling story'
—— ScotsmanA multiple biography and a detailed anatomy of the nature of friendship... A Train in Winter is a powerful and moving book; its significance is in bringing to a wider, non-French readership the particular and terrible fate of a group of women whose only crime was to love their country and to wish to do something to defend it, at a time when its government chose craven obedience to the occupier, with terrible consequences for so many of its people
—— Natasha Lehrer , Times Literary SupplementThis is a clear-sighted, distressing and unforgettable book
—— Stephanie Cross , The LadyA harrowing but also uplifting story of shared story of friendship, courage and endurance
—— Boyd Tonkin , Independent, Books of the YearIt is an exceptional achievement on the author's part to have reconstructed these obscure lives that so often ended in sordid misery and to have restored their dignity and honour
—— Patrick Marnham , Literary ReviewAn outstanding and important book, compelling and deeply troubling
—— Peter Eade , Country LifeA hybrid of history and multiple biography, movingly chronicles the women's ordeal... [it] bears eloquent witness to the moral and material ruin of collaborationist in France
—— Ian Thomson , SevenA remarkable achievement of biographical and oral research and with a brilliant narrative and description
—— History TodayA highly fractured tale intended to resemble the crumbling nature of Money’s existence post war. Nothing is over-laboured. Each word resounds with sultry, heat-oppressive Georgia.
—— SpectatorMorrison's writing is so deft that even barely sketched characters leap off the page
—— Sunday TelegraphHome is a powerful reminder of the impact the past plays on the present
—— The TimesMorrison can say more in one word than most novelists manage in an entire book. Superb
—— Glasgow Sunday HeraldBursting with poetic language and horrific events this is a penetrating insight to the African-American experience
—— The LadyIt is a powerful set-up, building suspense and a mounting sense of anxiety
—— GuardianToni Morrison’s mesmerising prose manages to be both elegiac and visceral at the same time
—— Mail on Sunday