A review by stephaniebooks
A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII. by Sarah Helm
3.0
This book is dry, but having read some of Sarah Helm’s other work, I suspect that is much more Vera’s fault than anyone else’s.
Vera seems an incredibly difficult woman to pin down, and is described by countless of her contemporaries as ‘cagey’, so I can’t imagine the difficulty in pulling her story together from scraps after her death. Helm pulls together the multiple threads of her life in a masterful way, taking you through the research process alongside her while she uncovers Vera’s story, with all of the threads coming together only just at the end.
That being said, I do think there have been more recently written narratives with new document caches opened since this book’s publication, and the causal reader of this subject is likely better served elsewhere.
Vera seems an incredibly difficult woman to pin down, and is described by countless of her contemporaries as ‘cagey’, so I can’t imagine the difficulty in pulling her story together from scraps after her death. Helm pulls together the multiple threads of her life in a masterful way, taking you through the research process alongside her while she uncovers Vera’s story, with all of the threads coming together only just at the end.
That being said, I do think there have been more recently written narratives with new document caches opened since this book’s publication, and the causal reader of this subject is likely better served elsewhere.