She has already proven her mettle by standing up to and staring down the Germans in a magnificent opening scene, which I will not reveal here.

But learning that Édouard is being held in a particularly harsh “reprisal” camp, she must decide what she will sacrifice for Édouard’s freedom. Had I known that Jojo Moyes had twice won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award, “The Girl You Left Behind” would quickly have become the book I left behind — which would have been a big mistake. Sophie Lefevre, a hotel owner, ends up living in Occupied France, with German troops taking over her hotel every night. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.And I've learned that liking that book, which I am terrified I'll reread and hate and hence will forever avoid, may have been my sole positive Moyes experience. Eduoard is a painter and falls in love with Sophie, capturing her confidence and allure in a portrait. While Liv’s more pedestrian story is less romantic than Sophie’s and far less nuanced, Moyes is a born storyteller who makes it impossible not to care about her heroines. Both Sophie and Liv had to fight to hold on to what they valued, while dealing with the effects of being cast out from their comfort zones.

Moyes ( Me Before You) has created a riveting depiction of a wartime occupation that has mostly faded from memory. More than a century later, Sophie’s portrait, The Girl You Left Behind, hangs in the London home of another young woman.And then I saw something about occupied France in the First World War and realized I had heard so little about this part of history, and the two things slowly started to conflate in my mind. What the author has written is not a love story within a historical setting, but an excellent historical novel that is also a moving love story. It felt alternately boring and overwrought, and I initially picked this up pretty soon after reading All the Light We Cannot See, and it's really just unfair to authors everywhere to pick up chick-lit historical fiction after picking up Pulitzer Prize-winning historical fiction. Here I think immediately of the commandant, but also of Sophie’s siblings, her heroic sister, her doubting Thomas of a younger brother and one fellow resident of Peronne in particular. Widowed in her mid twenties when her architect husband David suddenly dies, Liv is bequeathed a portrait David bought when they first met - The Girl You Left Behind by Edouard Lefevre.

A celebrated architect, David designed several famous buildings, including their home, which now she can barely afford.That is the dilemma and though it seems she has little choice, there is always a choice, good or bad. When their small town falls to the Germans in the midst of World War I, Edouard's portrait of Sophie draws the eye of the new Kommandant. There are three girls left behind in this intricately-plotted, inventive novel, The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes, the latest much-anticipated must-read from the best-selling author of Me Before You and The Last Letter From Your Lover. Liv desperately tries to prove it was never stolen as the painting symbolises a little piece of David she doesn't want to part with. In this novel, Moyes weaves a WWI historical fiction story with a current London suspense/love story.