Silent Night, By Charles Ellingworth

Set in wartime Silesia and occupied France, Charles Ellingworth's quietly passionate debut follows the course of two conjoined love affairs.

The novel opens as a German woman travels to Northern France in search of a long lost prisoner of war with whom she had a wartime liaision.

While five years earlier, in 1940, a young French woman, Marie-Louise Annecy, daughter of the town's Vichy-style mayor, is drawn to a Luftwaffe pilot billeted in their house.

Ellingworth's over-written but engaging saga examines the moral twilight zone occupied by those caught between living a "good" and a "bad" war.

Both victors and victims must face the consequences of their wartime indiscretions. An evocative portrait of Forties France and the compromises born of peace.