When We Had Wings

When We Had Wings is the first collaboration by the three authors, who are well-known for writing historical fiction set in and around World War II. Their body of work often depicts resilient women whose courage and independence challenge society’s gender norms of the time: Ariel Lawhon’s Code Name Hélène (2020) presents a fictionalized account of the life of Nancy Wake, an Australian who worked as a British intelligence officer during the war; Kristina McMorris’s Sold on a Monday (2018) was inspired by a photograph (published in a 1948 magazine) of four siblings with their mother and a sign advertising the children for sale; and Susan Meissner’s Only the Beautiful (2023), set in the years leading up to and after the war’s conclusion, follows an orphaned girl unjustly institutionalized and forced to give up her infant daughter. The three protagonists of When We Had Wings likewise demonstrate profound courage in the face of personal and global struggles, and the authors’ collaborative effort emphasizes the untold heroism of the women, nurses, and ordinary civilians often left out of the war hero narrative.

In their Authors’ Note, Lawhon, McMorris, and Meissner state that they were inspired by the first female prisoners of the war (the book’s title is a subtle nod to the fact that these nurses were known as the Angels of Bataan) and wanted to tell a story that had been deliberately lost to history: “[W]e hadn’t heard of these nurses in all our years spent researching and writing in this

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