About the Author

Camille Di Maio left an award-winning real estate career to become a bestselling author. She has a bucket list that is never ending and uses her adventures to inspire her writing. She’s lived in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and California, and has spent enough time in Hawai‘i and Maine to feel like a local. She’s traveled to four continents (so far), and hopes to get to all of them someday. Camille studied political science in college. She loves to spend Saturdays at farmers’ markets and belts out Broadway tunes whenever the moment strikes. She lives with her husband of twenty-four years in coastal Virginia, has two kiddos grown and flown and two still at home. Rescue pets have been a long-term passion for her, the most recent addition being a German shepherd puppy.

Reading Group Guide

Author Essay

February 2020 found me in a place that profoundly changed the world eight decades ago—Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Almost to the day that I docked in that beautiful city, the world learned a new word that would once again change everything—coronavirus.

Where one aggressor was massive—with its kamikazes and bombs and spectacle—the other was microscopic.

I stood on the deck of the USS Missouri and surveyed my surroundings. I am not one to cry easily, but the gravity of where I was provoked a profound sense of awe and gratitude. And the tears followed.

Before me, encased in glass, lay the documents that signaled the end of World War II.

Little did I know that humanity was once again about to embark on a global battle of an entirely different nature.

I wrote this book about WWII during a worldwide lockdown. And though I had explored some of its themes in previous books I’d written, never did I feel as connected to the characters’ experiences as I did this time. Food rationing (or toilet paper, as the case was), uncertainty, loss, worry. We learned new skills. Businesses pivoted and updated. We all discovered how to Zoom. I deepened friendships with neighbors by having “Sidewalk Happy Hours” six feet apart—when previously, we’d all been too busy to get a common date on the calendar. I started a new hobby of canning fruit. (My peach preserves were delicious. My watermelon jelly, not so much.)

But I didn’t have a notion, on that February day, that these things were about to happen. That life as we knew it was going to change. I breathed in the Honolulu air and listened to the lapping ocean waves and imagined a time when the people of that city were similarly unaware of what was just around the corner.

They say history repeats itself. Which comes in handy for a historical fiction writer.