What This Book Is About

It is 1940, and London is under relentless German bombardment during the Blitz. Twelve-year-old Jakob Novis and his little sister Lina are evacuated from the city and sent to live in a village near Bletchley Park—the top-secret estate where Britain's brightest mathematicians, linguists, and codebreakers are racing to crack Nazi Germany's Enigma code. When the children stumble upon a series of coded puzzles hidden around the estate, they are drawn into a mystery that connects a missing codebreaker, a double agent, and secrets that could change the outcome of the war.

Ruta Sepetys (the bestselling author of Between Shades of Gray and Salt to the Sea) teams up with her brother Steve for a middle-grade adventure that reads like a wartime escape room. Each chapter includes puzzles, ciphers, and codes that readers can solve alongside Jakob and Lina. But beneath the adventure, the novel explores heavier themes: the trauma of displacement, the sacrifices ordinary people make in wartime, and the question of who gets to be called a hero when history is written.

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

Why UWC Chose This Book

The Bletchley Riddle combines history, STEM, and critical thinking in a way that is perfectly aligned with UWC's interdisciplinary curriculum. The embedded puzzles turn passive reading into active problem-solving, and the codebreaking theme naturally connects to mathematics, logic, and computer science—areas where UWC encourages cross-disciplinary thinking.

The novel also provides a different angle on World War II history. Rather than focusing on battles and generals, it highlights the contributions of civilians, women, and young people who worked behind the scenes. For UWC students who study conflict and peace, this is a powerful reminder that heroism takes many forms, and that the people who change history are not always the ones in the spotlight.