THE ESCAPE

A compelling wartime drama for fans of Lucinda Riley, Rachel Hore and Katherine Webb

One winter morning in Germany in early 1945, Detta passes a group of exhausted British prisoners of war who are being force-marched westwards. One man catches her eye and she cannot forget him. The following day she receives an urgent message to contact the local priest: he needs her help. Miranda is a photographer in Berlin in 1989 as the Wall falls. Trapped in an abusive relationship, her one hope for escape is an old postcard of the village her grandmother, Detta, was born in. But as she flees through East Germany, Miranda begins to suspect the Stasi are following her Two timelines, and two women who share a dark secret: can they save each other now the time has come to reveal it? The Escape is Clare's fourth compelling wartime novel. It is published in paperback, e-book, and audio download on 24 January 2019.

Detta: It is January 1945, Germany. Out walking in the snowy woods, Detta Bruncel passes a group of British prisoners of war who are being force-marched westwards. She catches the eye of one; afterwards she cannot forget his face. The following day she receives an urgent message: the local priest is harbouring a pair of escaped British airmen - can she help hide them? After she agrees Detta discovers that one of the escapees is the man from the woods, whose face etched itself in her mind.
A love affair between Detta and POW Tom Jenkins develops against a backdrop of evasion and danger. Detta protects Tom from the SS manhunt, but when the Russian invasion is imminent, she faces a dilemma: to evacuate to safety and lose Tom forever, or to stay and risk death at the hands of the notorious Red Army soldiers. Her solution is to claim to be French, and escape through Russian lines with the man she loves. But this means leaving behind her past life for good.
During the chaos and carnage of the invasion/liberation, Detta flees as Odette Bruncelle, a French forced worker, in the company of the British POWs. She leaves the only clue to her true identity hidden inside a tree trunk: an engraved silver locket. After the dangerous journey to the UK, and weeks incarcerated as an ‘enemy alien', Detta finally marries Tom, and her transformation is complete. She's no longer Detta Bruncel, the German girl; she's Mrs Odette Jenkins, a British military wife.

Miranda: It is November 1989, West Germany. Photographer Miranda Wade is in thrall to her controlling journalist boyfriend, Quill. After the Berlin Wall is breached, Miranda discovers Quill's real reason for being in Germany: he's involved in a cross-border drug smuggling operation. When she confronts Quill, he becomes violent, and she flees eastwards through the Wall.
In East Germany Miranda contacts her grandmother (who we discover is Detta), and sets off on a quest to find a hidden family heirloom (the engraved silver locket). En route, Miranda unwittingly photographs a Russian armaments train, and is hauled into the Stasi HQ at Frankfurt an der Oder for interrogation. When Quill uses his contacts to track her down, she's released into his arms. However, a call home reveals that her grandmother has had a stroke, and Miranda flees from Quill for a second time.
After crossing the border to Poland, Miranda hitches a lift with an off-duty airline pilot to grandmother's home village, where she manages to find the hidden locket. Before she leaves, Miranda takes a snap of the pilot, Michael, on the snowy path in the woods. Returning to the UK, Miranda visits her grandmother, who is still in a state of confusion. However, seeing Miranda, and holding the locket she hid before she fled Germany, helps Detta rediscover her identity and catalyses her recovery from the stroke.

Detta/Miranda: It is October 1990 and the reunification ceremony between East and West Germany is about to take place. In England, Detta begins to write memoirs of the great love affair that tore her from her homeland forty-five years earlier. In Germany, Miranda is about to leave the gallery preview of her first professional photography exhibition. At her side is Michael, now her fiancé – she's looking forward to a future as a German woman.

CLARE HARVEY was born in Devon, and spent part of her childhood living in Mauritius. She has had an itinerant adulthood as the trailing spouse of a soldier, working in journalism, charity PR and English tuition in Northern Ireland, Germany and Nepal. Clare has three children and lives in Nottingham. Clare's novel The Gunner Girl won the Exeter Novel Prize and the Joan Hessayon Award for debut romantic fiction.
https://clareharvey.net/