In the French countryside on the eve of World War II, two estranged sisters face the coming occupation in very different ways. Vianne Mauriac, married with a young daughter, watches her husband leave to fight and then must share her home with a billeted German officer, making one small, agonizing compromise after another to keep her child alive. Her younger sister Isabelle, reckless and headstrong, refuses to bend: she joins the Resistance and takes on one of its most dangerous tasks, guiding downed Allied airmen over the Pyrenees to safety.
Told largely through the sisters' alternating experiences, and framed by an unnamed elderly woman looking back from the present day, the novel follows the escalating cruelties of the occupation, the impossible choices forced on ordinary people, and the particular, often unrecorded courage of women in wartime.
Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale is a work of historical fiction about love, survival, and resistance under Nazi rule. It became one of the most widely read novels of its decade, praised for its emotional force and its portrait of two very different kinds of bravery.