The Resistance Book Club
Ellie Curzon
Bookouture Pub
August 2026
The Resistance Book Club by Ellie Curzon, the pen name for Catherine Curzon and Helen Barrell, is a gripping and heartbreaking wartime novel with family secrets in Cordeval, a village in France, along the Normandy coast. This is a fascinating dual-timeline historical fiction novel.
The past timeline takes readers back to Nazi occupied France. The French Resistance stood up to the cruelty through the secret actions of thousands of ordinary French citizens. Fast forward to the modern-day timeline, also set in Cordeval, but in 2025. Both storylines focus on books, female friendship, a charming town, and courageous people.
Margot is a widow, running a bookstore. She’s shocked by the Nazi’s implementation of a list of banned books, and she decides to take a stand against the barbaric policies and their equally horrific enforcement. Taking a quiet stand, she forms a book club of locals to read the banned books. The women gather at midnight, breaking the Nazi curfew. They discuss banned books, coded messages and their daring acts of resistance. The book club members also wrap the books in newsprint and secretly hide them in public places for others to find and read.
Margot’s friends include Esther, who is Jewish, and her baby daughter, Isabelle, Josephine and her young daughter, Beatrice, and a local professor, Theo, who is German. Esther asks Margot to take care of Isabelle if something should happen to her since the Nazis are rounding up Jews, to which Margot agrees.
The modern-day timeline features Margot’s great-granddaughter, Lucy, who is a high fashion magazine editor due to get a prestigious job, that would be a stepping stone to her dream job of Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue. But before she starts the job Lucy travels to Cordeval to settle her grandmother’s estate, which includes her bookstore. Unfortunately, before she leaves, Lucy finds her fiancé in bed with another woman. At the bookstore, Lucy discovers her grandmother left a letter, revealing a mystery involving the bookstore, that she wants Lucy to solve.
This storyline will have readers going through a gamut of emotions. Right from the beginning readers will be drawn into the lives of the characters and take the journey with them as they decide to use their love of books as an act of comfort and quiet rebellion during history’s darkest periods.
Elise Cooper: Idea for the story?
Ellie Curzon: We’d written the two orphan books, and we wanted to do something different. And I think we felt that if we could write something that was in occupied France there is more scope. We have written six books with the setting in England during World War II. And then with occupied France, there are high stakes. Literally there are uniforms patrolling of the streets, which obviously doesn’t happen in Britain. Also, we wanted to go back to the concept we’d had in the first series of there being a village to sort of weave in the whole village.
EC: What was the role of the book club?
EllieC: It’s kind of the heart of the story. It’s the place where the women meet. It’s a place where the resistance starts and it’s a place that they start as a safe space, but rapidly it becomes quite a dangerous place. They could sort of perform small acts of resistance that get bigger. And, a book club seemed like an obvious way. We thought it was a nice idea of women meeting together in a way that wouldn’t be viewed as suspicious. There was nothing overtly political or any overtly resisting about it. And it’s almost like the sort of thing that people might go, ‘Oh, yeah, the girls are at the book club.’ And we just really like the idea of a place where women could come together with a shared passion. They’re deliberately reading the banned books as their own way of standing up to these people who’ve turned up and taken away their liberties. But it just seemed like something that might also grab people and that people could relate to: books as the basis for resistance and learning and community because the Nazis burned and censored books. And the book club for us is it’s almost a community within the community of the village.
EC: How did you get the idea of tunnels?
EllieC (Helen): I came up with the tunnels. There are two things that the tunnels are based on. The first thing is that I grew up in a fishing village, on the coast, and there’s legend of there being tunnels under the village. I’ve never, ever met anyone who’s seen them, been in them, but that was partly where it came from. Then in the First World War, the army used tunnels. Those two sort of ideas merged. Because we were thinking, ‘how do they move around the village without anybody seeing them?’ The tunnels, really, just came together in my mind. So, that was where the tunnels came from.
EC: How did you choose the books for the story?
EllieC: There was a list of books that were banned in France. It had books that were overtly political, but then it had books that were a lot less political. So, we wanted to go back and take books from that list, named after the German ambassador to France who was Otto Abetz. All the books on the list had to be taken off bookshelves and any copies that were taken or in existence were supposed to be destroyed. Otto’s list just grew and grew and grew, and other longer lists came out later. So, the books that we use in the story were on that banned list. These books were seen for whatever reason as dangerous, degenerate, undesirable. Under the occupation, they were forcibly removed from sale and from bookshelves, including books with Jewish authors and Jewish characters. It’s amazing when you think that Grand Hotel was banned, when it was made into a famous film. And yet it was banned because the author was Jewish. They didn’t want any mention of Jewish people anywhere. There were also lesser- known books that were on the list, but because they were only printed in quite small numbers, they are virtually impossible to get today because they’ve never been reprinted. So, these books on the list that are to all intents and purposes, virtually lost today.
Helen: In Berlin, I visited their version of the National Library, and that was interesting because they had a display, and it included some books that had been banned in Germany. In Britain, we know that they rescued lots of books by hiding them, to protect them from the bombing. In this display, they had photographs of places in Germany where German librarians had taken their books out of their libraries and put them somewhere safe as well.
EC: What about the book burnings?
EllieC: There were book burnings in Germany, very famous, but as far as we know there weren’t book burnings in France. So that was kind of artistic license. But it is a horrifying idea, burning books, isn’t it?
EC: Do you think the book club became the nanny club?
EllieC: That’s quite nice. Yeah, don’t disagree with that. We really like the idea of that with them sort of passing Isabelle around to keep her safe, and we thought as well that readers would like that because they out foxed the Nazis. The way they sort of bundle her around and hide her in things.
Helen: I got the idea partly from when my niece was only two weeks old, and she kept being passed around the family because my brother lives with my mum, my stepdad. So, like, every time the baby cried, she was passed around. And there was this woman who, when it was time for the woman to have her appointment, she’d pass her baby to one of the other women. They just would do that very naturally, which is kind of what’s happening in the club.
EC: How would you describe Margot, the book shop owner?
Helen: Margot is very brave. She’s very aware of the responsibility she has to her friends, and her village, and to Isabelle. She’s feels she has got to do something. After she witnesses something horrible, and tragic, it drives her to be brave.
EC: What about Lucy?
EllieC: She absolutely knows where she’s going. She’s laser focused at the very beginning. But then her life goes off track because everything suddenly goes upside down. She has this life, and that’s her aim, thinking, ‘Oh, I could be editor of Vogue one day, and, and have this fabulous townhouse, with champagne receptions and opening nights.’ And it all falls apart. Then suddenly, she’s inherited this bookshop, and suddenly, this whole other possible life opens to her. And she must decide, which path am I going to take?
EC: What about the professor?
Catherine: The professor is not what he seems to be. He’s the quiet man. I really like heroes and heroines who have a sort of quietness to them and that they’re not someone you would expect to suddenly be saving the day, He’s not someone that you would look at and say, ‘oh, that man looks like a hero.’ He is not a drop dead, a gorgeous leading man. I liked the interplay between him and his brother and the completely different characters they’d become. And the way that these two boys who grew up together are probably, if not for the war, would probably never have seen one another again. They’re brothers, but they are complete strangers to one another. They are completely opposite sides of the same coin. The Professor is trying to live life quietly and his brother literally rolls into town and brings sort of hell with him into the village. The Professor is the one who’s more at home with his piano and his talks. And but for this war happening, would have been very happy with that quiet life. I really enjoyed writing him because he’s obviously not like the typical hero in any way.
EC: His brother Felix, the Nazi?
Catherine: Felix is vicious, unthinking, uncaring, cruel, and intimidating. And he’s very good at the show stopping. He’s very focused on the immediate gratification. He arrives in town, he gets a mistress, he starts tearing the place up. He starts terrorizing people. But when it comes down to his ambition his eye for theatre is so great, and for the limelight, that he makes that massive mistake. He is someone who from childhood has been an absolute loose cannon in every way. He’s basically, I think, probably a psycho. Very, very ruthless, very ambitious, very cruel, the sort of person who would go very, very far in the Third Reich. But as with many of the sort of top brass of that regime, he lacked the sense of strategy to do anything meaningful beyond those bursts of cruelty. He’s basically a monster. And I wanted to show that because I didn’t want him to just feel like a caricatured, nasty, nasty character, you know. And I wanted it to show this is not just someone who was driven by ambition, but there is real genuine hatred. In the book there is a quite frightening moment when he enters the Jewish mother, Esther’s home, it’s violent and it’s brutal and it’s awful. He spits on her. He has deep seated and horrific hatred. And we wanted that moment to be really a visceral moment because to me, spitting on someone is just awful, and then he just steps over her and walks away.
EC: What was the role of Beatrice?
EllieC: She was a very youthful character because she could go places. And hear things and we all know that with kids, that people talk quite loosely sometimes around children. So, Beatrice hears things and sees things and can carry messages back and forth, but she’s also really important to show in the future that Beatrice’s generation won’t ever have to face anything like this again, but equally Beatrice is being raised with the right values and she’s being raised as a fierce woman who is going to sort of drive forward if you like. She’s not going to just sit at home and be rolled over. She’s going to keep this going, these resistance acts in whatever way she can.
EC: Next book?
EllieC: It will come out in the spring of next year and is set in the same village as this one. Instead of being in the bookshop there is this florist shop, and behind the florists, there’s a garden, full of vegetables that they’re growing for local people, and resistance members, and there might just be a British airmen hidden in the shed. But it’s a dual timeline story again and both timelines are tied together by a mysterious rose. It’s full of drama and romance and villains and hopefully characters readers want to cheer for. There will be returning characters. Obviously, it’s a new set of main characters. So, we’re in the same village with the same characters from the previous storyline. And in the modern storyline, it has new modern characters, but again, you will see the main modern characters from the previous book returning. So, you’re back in the world. A new reader, can start from scratch with this one, and doesn’t need to read the last one. But if you have read the last one, it’s just building that sense of community and village.
THANK YOU!!
