The Paper Birds by Jeanette Lynes is historical fiction, from a Canadian perspective. Many readers of WWII history will know about Camp X, a spy training facility near Whitby, Ontario. But they might not know about the prisoner-of-war camps in Canada, nor about the Canadian women who worked under the Official Secrets Act in small facilities and converted private homes.
This is the story of Gemma Sullivan who works in an “office” job in the summer of 1943, with 4 other women, working to break codes. They meet daily at the “Cottage” and are given intercepts to break, but they have none of the machinery of Whitby or the prestige of Bletchley Park. It’s just their pencils and wits. The women have diverse talents in mathematics, logic, and literature. But they don’t share much in common, which leads Gemma to wander off during a lunch break for some alone time. During her walk, she is led by a stray cat to the edges of a prisoner-of-war camp where she strikes up a conversation with a prisoner. Fraternizing with the enemy has steep penalties and, given her intelligence work, it could be very bad news for Gemma. But she is drawn over and over to the handsome prisoner at the fence.
The Paper Birds is a quiet love story. There are no big dramas here, just the underlying tension Gemma feels about all the lies and lives she is upholding through her job.
I was not familiar with Jeanette Lynes before but she’s a Canadian author and has several books that have won or been nominated for awards in both fiction and non-fiction. So I’m keen to find more of her work.