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The Nightingale is a wartime novel
The Nightingale is one of Reese’s Book Club’s historical fiction picks, with the woman herself declaring it “arguably one of the most powerful, most captivating novels about WWII in recent years.” Importantly, it hinges upon what Reese Witherspoon called “a part of history that’s often overlooked: the women’s war.”
Kristin Hannah tells the story of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, in Nazi-occupied France — the former cautious and pragmatic, the latter bold and rebellious. As war closes in, their paths diverge. Vianne is left behind to protect her daughter and forced to make unthinkable choices just to keep her family safe. A restless Isabelle, on the other hand, throws herself into the Resistance to fight the Nazis, taking on the codename “Nightingale.”
Though this is a fictional work, Hannah drew on real accounts of female resistance as inspiration — most notably that of Andrée de Jongh, who helped Allied airmen escape Nazi territory on foot. It’s this poignancy that earned “The Nightingale” it’s place in the Reese’s Book Club canon, where it was tagged with labels like “all the things” and “pass the tissues.”
Readers resonated with the book deeply. On GoodReads, reactions are intensely personal. One five-star reviewer confessed, “With tears still running down my cheeks, I’m writing this review,” as another said, “This book was absolutely phenomenal. Outside of my comfort zone for sure, but it’s opened me up to a whole new genre that I never thought I’d be interested in.”
