Priscilla

Reviews / Votes

A pin-sharp biography which unfurls like gripping fiction... wonderful, haunting, thought-provoking -- Melanie Reid * The Times * I have not read a better portrait of the moral impossibility of that time and place for people, like Priscilla, who found themselves trapped in it... A wonderful book * Daily Telegraph * As Shakespeare acknowledges, his aunt's is one of millions of wartime stories. But thanks to the extensive paperwork, and his energetic digging, he creates a detailed and vivid narrative. This is a moving, and constantly surprising story -- Matthew Bell * Independent on Sunday * So gripping it reads like a novel -- Rachel Johnson * Evening Standard * This mysterious story of the Occupation in France has all the qualities of a fascinating novel, with exquisite social, sexual and moral nuance -- Antony Beevor Shakespeare offers a nuanced and detailed psychological study of the effect of the Second World war on an ordinary woman. The result is just as absorbing as any biography of a war hero * Sunday Times * Nicholas Shakespeare has employed all his superb gifts as a writer to tell the picaresque tale of his aunt in wartime occupied France. Priscilla is a femme fatale worthy of fiction, and the author traces her tangled, troubled, romantic and often tragically unromantic experiences through one of the most dreadful periods of 20th-century history -- Max Hastings Priscilla brilliantly exposes the tangled complexities behind that question so easily asked from the comfort of a peacetime armchair: "What would I have done?" * Observer * Priscilla's descent into hell runs eerily parallel to that of France itself; Faustian, fascinating and in the end extremely sad -- Sebastian Faulks * Observer, Books of the Year * An account of the author's aunt's life in France under the Nazis. Her descent parallels that of France: Grim but fascinating -- Sebastian Faulks * Observer *