THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON by Meg Waite Clayton – SPOTLIGHT & GIVEAWAY

GIVEAWAY CLOSED

The New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Exiles conjures her best novel yet. Centering on the Kindertransports that carried thousands of children out of Nazi-occupied Europe, author Meg Waite Clayton focuses on one brave woman who helped them escape to safety in her new novel, THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON (Harper).

It’s 1936 in THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON (Harper). The Nazis are little more than loud, brutish bores to fifteen-year old Stephan Neuman, the son of a wealthy and influential Jewish family and budding playwright whose playground extends from Vienna’s streets to its intricate underground tunnels. Stephan’s best friend and companion is the brilliant Žofie-Helene, a Christian girl whose mother edits a progressive, anti-Nazi newspaper. But the two adolescents’ carefree innocence is shattered when the Nazis’ take control.

There is hope in the darkness, though. Truus Wijsmuller, a member of the Dutch resistance, risks her life smuggling Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to the nations that will take them. It is a mission that becomes even more dangerous after the Anschluss—Hitler’s annexation of Austria—as, across Europe, countries close their borders to the growing number of refugees desperate to escape.

Tante Truus, as she is known, is determined to save as many children as she can. After Britain passes a measure to take in at-risk child refugees from the German Reich, she dares to approach Adolf Eichmann, the man who would later help devise the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” in a race against time to bring children like Stephan, his young brother Walter, and Žofie-Helene on a perilous journey to an uncertain future abroad.

Book club favorite and New York Times and USA Today bestseller Meg Waite Clayton is the author of seven novels, including The Last Train to London, which will be published by HarperCollins in the U.S. on September 10, 2019, and will be published in Czech by Grada, Danish by GADS, Dutch by HarperCollins-Holland, French by Les Escales, Hebrew by Matar, Italian by HarperCollins-Italia, Portuguese by HarberCollins-Iberica, Portuguese (Brazil) by HarperCollins-Brazil, Slovak by IKAR,  and Spanish by HarperCollins-Iberica.

Her prior books include the #1 Amazon fiction bestseller Beautiful Exiles; the Langum Prize honored The Race for Paris; The Wednesday Sisters, named one of Entertainment Weekly’s 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time (on a list with The Three Musketeers!); and The Language of Light, a finalist for the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (now the PEN/Bellwether). She has written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Runner’s World and public radio, often on the subject of the particular challenges women face. A member of the National Book Critic’s Circle, she writes a monthly audiobook review for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Meg was born in Washington D.C., and has since lived in Kansas City, the Chicago area (Wheeling, Palatine, Northbrook), Los Angeles (Sierra Madre, West Hollywood, Santa Monica), Ann Arbor, Baltimore, Nashville, Santa Barbara and Palo Alto. She love to travel, so her books tend to be set in places she find fascinating: France for The Race for Paris, the English Lakes for The Wednesday Daughters, Ann Arbor and the Chesapeake for The Four Ms. Bradwells, Silicon Valley for The Wednesday Sisters, and the horse country of Maryland for The Language of Light. For Beautiful Exiles the list is long but includes in Key West, Sun Valley, New York, and St. Louis, as well as Cuba, Spain, China, France, England, Czechoslovakia, and Sweden.  The Last Train to London is set in Vienna, Austria, and in England, the Netherlands, Germany, and (very briefly) Paris.

Thanks to HarperCollins we have one copy to giveaway. Just tell us about the last WWII novel you read. We’ll announce a winner soon. Good luck.

GIVEAWAY: USA only please