This book took me in from page one. I,could not put it down, my kindle came everywhere with me. A women of two sides who is in a mental hospital because of things that happen in the war and after. It is also a love story. There is no happy ending to the love, and a child she has never seen believes she is dead. A very good book about the 2nd world war.

Last week I was hit with a one-two punch of historical fiction. First, it was Kristin Hannah’s brilliant The Great Alone, set mostly in 1970s and 1980s Alaska. Then it was Eliza Graham’s tautly paced The Lines We Leave Behind, a suspenseful story of an amnesia-afflicted woman who is in an asylum post-WWII that played havoc with my nerves.

When the book opens, we’re in 1947 England, and Maud’s psychiatrist Dr. Rosenstein encourages her to write down her memories.

This is what Maud initially remembers: in 1943 Maud Knight was a well-off young woman living in Blitz-era London, seemingly without purpose. She had affairs, she had an unimportant job, but no higher calling. She was approached by a magnetic man, Robert Havers, who expressed admiration for her special talents—including her ability to speak Serbo-Croat, to observe details keenly, to memorize them—and he offered her a position as a British secret agent aiding Partisan (communist) forces fight other fringe groups (and ultimately the Germans) in Yugoslavia and rescuing downed Allies and returning them back home.

Maud accepts the position, and she’s given the name Amber. In Yugoslavia, she learns real danger, real pain, for the first time, and she becomes aware of the complicated lines wartime can drive between family members and neighbors, and how it can test the physical self and the spirit.

That was Maud then.

But something’s happened in the years since, to turn someone who served her country so admirably into a mental asylum resident, and that’s the gripping story that unfolds for Maud, Dr. Rosenstein, and the reader, page by page.

The Lines We Leave Behind tells a story that I haven’t quite heard before, in a place that I haven’t a read a story set in. Graham deftly portrays the toll of war, illuminating how it changes people, and how it makes heroism and depravity possible—sometimes within the same person. This is a heavy story (seriously), but it is also one that is not without redemption, and those slices of light are what I like best about it.

This well-written book is by turns exhilarating and disturbing, and entirely haunting.

**I received a copy of this book from Netgalley, but all opinions provided are my own.

A great book. This was a well throughout book. It certainly makes you remember and think about our WW2 soldiers.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Amazon for my eARC in exchange for my honest unbiased review

I got really caught up in this story from the start. It is a part of history that I knew very little about. It is a hard read in places and the story has obviously been well researched and well thought out. In a lot of ways this is a sad story. Maud loses so much of her life due to events beyond her control. It is good that events in World War 2 are being remembered and talked about.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

There have been a lot of World War II novels published lately, and I believe in some ways it’s because we want to remember a time when we knew what we were fighting for, when the difference between good and evil was apparent for all to see. This story deals with the aftermath of the war and the personal devastation it brought down on one woman, now locked up in a mental hospital for a violent crime she cannot remember committing, As she revisits the past she does remember, Yugoslavia and the atrocities of the war there, it’s no wonder much of her recent memory is blank. She must find a way to reconstruct the memories she has chosen to bury, even if she risks uncovering something unbearable