The Baker’s Secret: A Novel

Emmanuelle is twenty-two years old when the Germans arrive in her small Normandy village. She is a baker by trade, having learned her craft working beside the village master since she was thirteen. She now rivals him in skill, and her talent does not go unnoticed by the occupying force, who quickly put her to work baking bread for the army. Emma, however, doesn’t just bake bread. She builds up a complex network of bartered items throughout her small village that keeps her neighbors from starving or going mad. Beauty, she realizes, can be found in these small efforts at resistance, but dangerous consequences lurk around every corner if she were to be found out.

Bringing the reader quickly into the daily rhythm of life in a small French village, Stephen Kiernan has created characters who movingly represent the small ways in which local townspeople all over Europe tried to survive and, when possible, fight back against the occupying German force during WWII. Emma’s endeavors and adventures during the war years before D-Day are powerfully rendered.