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Title details for A Life in Secrets by Sarah Helm - Available

A Life in Secrets

The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE

by Sarah Helm
Frances Jeater
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available

From an award-winning journalist comes this real-life cloak and dagger tale of Vera Atkins, one of Britain's premier secret agents during World War II. As the head of the French Section of the British Special Operations Executive, Vera Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored special operatives whose job was to organise and arm the resistance in Nazi-occupied France. After the war, Atkins courageously committed herself to a dangerous search for 12 women spies missing in action. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Sarah Helm chronicles Atkin's extraordinary life and her singular journey through the chaos of post-war Europe. Brimming with intrigue, heroics, honour, and the horrors of war, this is the story of a grand, elusive woman and a tour de force of investigative journalism.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 1, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • File size: 574830 KB
      • Duration: 19:57:33

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from April 17, 2006
      Vera Atkins (1908–2000) was the highest-ranking female official in the French section of a WWII British intelligence unit that aided the resistance. Atkins sent 400 agents into France, including 39 women she'd personally recruited and supervised. Many were caught by the Gestapo and subsequently disappeared and presumed dead. In 1945, after the war, Atkins, fiercely loyal to the memory of her missing agents, took it upon herself to spend a year interviewing concentration camp officials and survivors in order to piece together her agents' fates. Helm, a founding member of London's Independent
      , brilliantly reconstructs Atkins's harrowing detective work, shedding light in particular on the fate of missing agent Noor Inayat Khan, whose suitability for the job had been widely doubted. Helm's portrait of Atkins is acute, dwelling evocatively on her Romanian-Jewish origins and their social significance for Atkins within upper-crust British circles, and on Atkins's mysterious personal life. Drawing on interviews with relatives and friends of both Atkins and her agents, and on full access to Atkins's private papers, Helm has produced a memorable portrait of a woman who knowingly sent other women to their deaths and a searing history of female courage and suffering during WWII.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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