Thanks to Netgalley for this ARC. A good read with a compelling central character and an engaging plot. Recommended!

"A heartbreaking and deeply compelling debut, Mrs. Sinclair’s Suitcase is a compulsive page-turner about thwarted love, dashed hopes, and family secrets—book-club fiction at its best.

Roberta, a lonely thirty-four-year-old bibliophile, works at The Old and New Bookshop in England. When she finds a letter inside her centenarian grandmother’s battered old suitcase that hints at a dark secret, her understanding of her family’s history is completely upturned. Running alongside Roberta’s narrative is that of her grandmother, Dorothy, as a forty-year-old childless woman desperate for motherhood during the early years of World War II. After a chance encounter with a Polish war pilot, Dorothy believes she’s finally found happiness, but must instead make an unthinkable decision whose consequences forever change the framework of her family.

The parallel stories of Roberta and Dorothy unravel over the course of eighty years as they both make their own ways through secrets, lies, sacrifices, and love. Utterly absorbing, Mrs. Sinclair’s Suitcase is a spellbinding tale of two worlds, one shattered by secrets and the other by the truth."

Lonely bibliophile... yeah, I can relate.

Roberta likes to collect the letters and postcards she finds in second-hand books. When her father gives her some of her grandmother's belongings, she finds a baffling letter from the grandfather she never knew - dated after he supposedly died in the war.

Dorothy is unhappily married to Albert, who is away at war. When an aeroplane crashes in the field behind her house she meets Squadron Leader Jan Pietrykowski, and as their bond deepens she dares to hope she might find happiness. But fate has other plans for them both, and soon she is hiding a secret so momentous that its shockwaves will touch her granddaughter many years later..

Told in past/present form, Mrs. Sinclair's Suitcase had a charm all its own. Each chapter begins with a description of notes, cards, or random finds found between the pages of used books. It is here that present-day Roberta stumbles across a letter that she suspects belonged to her paternal grandmother. There her search for more clues about her 110 year old grandmother begins. Besides, the reader learns more about the bookshop Roberta works in, and her two coworkers.

The war time love story between Dorothy and Polish pilot Jan was great. It was very well written and moving. I also loved how Roberta's story developed alongside Dorothea's and was as much a journey of discovery for herself as it was to find out the secrets her Grandmother had kept hidden for so many decades. Aside from being Granddaughter and Grandmother, Roberta and Dorothea are linked by the things in their lives which remain unsaid and a fear of letting others in. This is all tied together beautiful in the closing chapters, which really are beautifully and tenderly written.

I recommend this book,especially if you liked Letters To The Lost by Iona Grey. Its an amazing novel set in the past and present time!

This one was interesting, but it wasn't as good as I had expected. I liked having the two storylines - one current and one during WWII, but I didn't really connect with the characters. I found none of them particularly likable and that kept me from getting throughly caught up in the story. The book had much potential, but didn't live up to it for me.