Cardigan Bay

By John C. Kerr

A sweeping tale of two separate lives brought together in a time of historical crisis When Major Charles Davenport is evacuated to England to recuperate from a battle wound received at Tobruk, a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0719814170
• ISBN13: 9780719814174
• Release Date: February 2015
• Publisher: Robert Hale & Company
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Cardigan Bay: WW II in Ireland

This historical fiction gave me insights into the conflicting feelings in Ireland during WW II, of which I was not aware. I really enjoyed the book, and reccommended it with confidence to my library friends.

Engrossing read

This book was an engrossing read. It provided new insights to aspects of WWII (like the Irish experience) that I hadn't known, and gave a vivid feel to the place and time leading up to the Normandy invasion. The characters came alive as they faced tough choices. Hope this is made into a movie that does it justice.

An Interesting and Old-Fashioned take

I say old-fashioned because this is definitly an old-fashioned sort of book. It would not have raised any eyebrows if it had been published during the time that it was set. Whether you view that opinion as a plus or a minus depends on your personal taste in historical fiction. "Cardigan Bay" is at once a romance and an espionage thriller, set during World War Two. The story is woven from several threads, some of them fairly well known - such as the elaborate and ongoing planning for the Normandy invasion by the Allies, the work of the top-secret code-breakers at Bletchley Park and the plot by anti-Nazi German military officers to assassinate Hitler. The central character, a British Army officer named Charles Davenport, is a thoughtful and erudite man - unhappily married and even more unhappily divorced. Upon recovering from wounds sustained in the fighting in North Africa, he moves into a staff job, working out a means of landing masses of soldiers on the Normandy beaches. He has a brief meeting with a lonely Irish-American woman, Mary Kennedy, who has returned to her grandparents' seaside house in County Wexford. Mary, widowed and grieving for a child and a husband, had been corresponding with a soldier in Davenport's company. Mary and Charles strike up a friendship - a love affair even - through letters over the next few years. The final thread, which binds the rest together, is the neutrality of Ireland during that war, and the proclivity of the Germans to work with certain elements of the violently anti-British IRA. The writer has used this circumstance to create the surprisingly sympathetic character of the Abwehr agent who goes by the nom du guerre of Eamon O' Farrell. That he is not who he says he is at first is obvious; that he is revealed as a German spy is something the alert reader can see coming from several chapters away, so I am not giving up any plot development. But the final character revelation is an interesting twist and one that in the narrative is left hanging. Carefully researched, and in places almost lyrically descriptive, there are a handful of flaws. Charles's dialogue does not quite sound entirely British, in places - he says "Sure," to indicate agreement and assent, where an Englishman of that time and place would have said "Certainly" or "Of course." I also thought the conversation where Charles and a fellow officer exchange talk about their respective wartime top-secret jobs struck a false note. In the military that was and still is the sort of matter not talked about outside the `shop', even among close friends. There is no way that someone at the highest level of planning the invasion plans would have mentioned details of his work to an outsider, nor would a Bletchley insider have voiced the slightest whisper about the Enigma device. It was necessary for the plot for those two characters to know what the other was involved in - but I think it would have been more realistic and more historically accurate for t

lakebookseller

I enjoyed this book. The apparently factual historic events made the story interesting and the book compelling. I found the writing style refreshing and liked the WWII era sexual modesty. It was nice to read a book that reminded me of the innocence (compared to today) we no longer see or read about in our society. It reminded me of a black and white movie.......I could see one of the debonair actors of the day as Maj. Davenport. I liked reading about the war from a British perspective and the absence of cynicism was a plus. I hope this author writes again. He has a gift. I wouldn't say that I could not put the book down, but I definitely wanted to finish it. I liked the characters.

best WWII novel since Winds of War

This book grabs your attention from the first page. A painless way to learn history of the events leading up to D-Day and a wonderful love story. The author's attention to detail makes you see this as a movie on the big screen. My friends have all read it and loved it. cound NOT put it down.