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The Hey, folks. Welcome to the Battles of the First World War podcast.

You folks know that I love books like the best of them, and you should also know that I almost never say no to a book.

So when the publishers, W.W. Norton and company, offered to send me a novel that has a strong World War I background, of course, I said yes.

I have never before read any of Miss Anne Hood's novels before, and I'm always up for fiction.

The Stolen Child is a story of lives that might have been and were not, and of lives that might have been and are given a second chance.

Nick Burns is a dying old man.

For decades, he has lived with the guilt of a terrible decision he made during the dark days of

1918 in war-torn France. Entrusted with a desperate Frenchwoman's newborn baby,

he abandons it in a desperate act that disrupts the rest of his life.

In 1974, Nick reluctantly hires Jenny to help him discover what happened to the baby and his

mother.

Jenny, a college dropout and mother to a child given up for adoption, knows she is hopelessly

adrift and needs a new life.

Together, the unlikely duo of complete strangers set off to Europe,

hoping to find out what happened to an unknown baby

in a forgotten corner of France during the darkest days of the Great War.

What follows are differing journeys of self-discovery, redemption, making peace with the past,

and love, both gained and lost. Parallel stories of two artisan brothers unfold as well with the older brother ever contemptuous and dismissive of his younger sibling.

Nick and Jenny's investigations take them to Paris and old battlefields and sleepy villages in France,

and from there to Italy. For Nick and Jenny come to find that the abandoned baby is indeed

...