What This Book Is About

Summer 1940. Nineteen-year-old Jakob Novis, recruited out of Cambridge, is already working at Bletchley Park, the secret estate where Britain is breaking the German Enigma cipher. His fourteen-year-old sister Lizzie is meant to be sent to their grandmother in America. She refuses to go. Their mother Willa, who worked at the American Embassy in London, disappeared during the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and Lizzie does not believe she is dead.

The novel is narrated in turns by Jakob and Lizzie, one sibling written by each of its two award-winning authors. Jakob doubts their mother is alive; Lizzie starts looking anyway, and when coded messages begin arriving in the post the two of them work together to find out what happened to her. The search for Willa, rather than the codebreaking, is what drives the book. Alan Turing and the American ambassador Joseph Kennedy appear in minor parts.

Available at Popular bookstores, Kinokuniya, and the Singapore National Library.

Why UWC Chose This Book

The book sits where history, mathematics and logic meet, which suits a school that teaches across subject lines. It also shows the Second World War from inside the intelligence work rather than from the battlefield, which is a side of the war students rarely meet first.

The two narrators are worth noticing in themselves. Jakob and Lizzie read the same events differently, and because each author writes one of them, the two voices genuinely pull against each other. For students learning to read a text for point of view, that is a useful thing to have in their hands. The question the novel turns on, whether to accept what everyone else has already accepted about your own mother, is also one a twelve-year-old can argue about seriously.