S.O.E. Special Operations Executive (Paperback)

S.O.E. - SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE - also known as "Churchill's Secret Army" or "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare" - is tasked with espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in Europe in World War Two. Women are regularly recruited and sent behind enemy lines. As a wireless operator, their life expectancy is six weeks. MADELEINE is the codename for one such agent. Flown by moonlight to France in 1943, her job is to keep her circuit of agents connected with London. She cannot trust anyone. Josef Kieffer, a Major in the Gestapo, is on her trail ... and she doesn't know how much time she has left. The net is closing. Once the war was over Vera Atkins determined to find the truth. Of all her twelve missing women agents, the one that haunts her the most is MADELEINE the Indian princess, Noor Inayat Khan. This fascinating, moving drama places two remarkable women at the centre of the action. Also in this collection: BEST BELOVED is based on the true story of Rudyard Kipling's near fatal visit to America in 1899 where the whole family was struck down by illness. Told by a young stenographer named Martha Pitcher - who is employed to record Kipling's fevered dreams - the action moves between the chaos of the media scrum outside the Kiplings' Manhattan hotel and from within Kipling's hallucinations (where he imagines he's trapped inside a whale). Kipling begins to recover but tragically his daughter Josephine dies; A NECESSARY WOMAN by Deborah Clair and Philippa Urquhart presents an imagined re-telling of what happened during Emily Davison's missing sixty-two hours ... Women up and down the country prepared to avoid and evade the Census as a protest and challenge to authority. 'No Vote, no Census!' was their battle cry. Two days before the Census, suffragette Emily Davison conceals herself in a cleaning cupboard, in the undercroft beneath the Palace of Westminster. Emily plans to stage a daring and courageous intervention in Parliament on Monday morning, but with a large police presence and security unusually tight, will she achieve her ambition before she is caught and imprisoned again?