I liked the concept behind The Partisans, and the way the reader is left wondering just what part everyone played in the end. But the plot felt very disconnected, with all the jumping back and forth in place and time.

This is an interesting book, I think those that are chess aficionados and like WW2 history, Russian/German especially, will enjoy this. There are four main characters in this story, Greta a resistance fighter during the war and afterwards she hunts down Nazis that got away. Michael and Yulia are young chess prodigies who meet at a chess tournament and immediately become smitten, Michael's father is a high ranking official in British intelligence and Yulia' s mother is also a high ranking official, in Russia. Vassily is assigned to watch Yulia during the chess tournament to ensure she doesn't decide to leave for another county. It does take a while for all the story lines to come together and I found the beginning of the book to be a tad confusing. Once everything starts to fall into place, the story gels and it is quite good, though at times I found it was a bit slow. There is also some torture/violence that is quite graphic, but during times of war people don't always act nice to each other. The ending was good, but sad at the same time. Thanks to #Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

An excellent debut novel by the author, which would make a great movie. The only reason I did not give the book five stars is because it was somewhat hard to follow the flashbacks and flash forwards. There were also a large number of characters.