THE WOMAN IN THE SABLE COAT

The lives of two British families collide during WWII as essential truths about them are obscured by deceptions—past and ongoing—in this historical fiction (with some surprises up its sleeve).

Adolescent friends Nina Woodrow and Rose Allen spend languid prewar summers together whenever Rose visits family in the quiet English village where Nina lives with her widowed father, Henry. A chance meeting with visiting Canadian Joey Roussin leads the girls and Henry to dine with him and his friends Guy and Kate Nicholson, a married couple who’ve just moved to the village. This meeting marks the beginning of Nina’s growing awareness of (and attraction to) to men, Guy in particular. Years later, after the outbreak of war, in a somewhat orchestrated (by Nina) “coincidence,” Nina and Guy meet at the RAF air base where both are stationed. The spiraling effects of Nina and Guy’s developing relationship during the war—played out against the devastation and loss visited upon civilians and military alike—have consequences not only for the couple but also for their families and friends. Kate and son Pip are left to their own devices as Guy pursues his military and romantic goals away from home, and, intriguingly, the stolid-appearing Henry appears to represent a measure of comfort and stability to her. Using plot elements that hark back to an earlier era of storytelling and echoes of the thwarted lovers in the classic British wartime movie Brief Encounter, Brooks concocts an increasingly complex web of misunderstanding and misdirection. Kate narrates her own account of the events, while the more enigmatic Nina’s perspective is related in the third person, but it is the latter’s story that launches the narrative from a suspenseful and equivocal prologue.

A new-fashioned, old-fashioned story of love, deception, and buried secrets.