The English Girl

By: Margaret Leroy

Narrated by: Penelope Rawlins

When 17-year-old Stella Whittaker is offered the chance to study at the Academy of Music in Vienna it's a dream come true, made possible by old family friends, Rainer and Marthe Kraus, who offer her a place to live.

Seduced by the elegant beauty of the city, Stella explores the magnificent palaces, gardens, and fashionable coffeehouses, and after a chance meeting in an art gallery, falls in love with Harri Reznik, a young Jewish doctor. But as the threat of war casts a dark shadow over Europe, Stella soon discovers that both the household where she lives and the city she has come to call home are not as welcoming as they once seemed. And at the dawn of this terrifying new world, no one is safe.

©2013 Margaret Leroy (P)2014 Isis Publishing Limited

Critic reviews

"A wonderful, wonderful book! Margaret Leroy does an amazing job of showing us the Nazi takeover of Austria through the eyes of an engaging, bright and brave seventeen-year-old English girl. I lost three nights of sleep, unable to put this superbly written book aside and turn out the light" (Diane Chamberlain)

"Margaret Leroy writes with candour and intelligence, capturing the menace of suddenly finding that the world may not be at all as you've thought it" (Helen Dunmore)

"Margaret Leroy captures, brilliantly, a spirit of place and time in her recreation of the beauty, deception and coming darkness of pre-war Vienna, and what it means to be young, in love, and very far from home. I loved it" (Elizabeth Speller)

"Stunning and evocative, utterly beguiling" (Rosamund Lupton)