Letters to the Lost by Iona GreyMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I would like to share with you a book that has left a profound impression on me. Yes, its pure fiction and one may think ….oh it’s only a story made up in a writer’s imagination. Yes, it is that….but it will be a story that will inspire you…make you believe that Love is Timeless regardless….It’s a book I want to share with my friends…..a story that is heartbreaking but uplifting too. A love story that transcends time. Yes, you might also think that you have read similar stories…but Letters to the Lost is something special, something unforgettable, a story filled with characters that stay with you for a very long time.
I was so lucky to find this book by Ione Grey….thanks to my good GR friend, Jessica Gadziala, who commented on the review I wrote on India Grey’s Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper (At His Service #1), where I mentioned that I loved this author’s books but hadn’t seen anything from her for ages…she told me that the author was now writing under the name of Ione Grey and…voila!!!! Thanks so much Jessica!!!
I was immediately drawn to the book title…Letters to the Lost…evocative, powerful, and beautiful!!!
This was a vibrant and enthralling read that grabbed me from the first page until the end. A story of love lost and found again. Heart-wrenching, compelling, tender, heart-breaking, heartening, inspiring that makes you smile through the tears that spill from your eyes.
A brief synopsis:
1943, in the ruins of Blitzed London...The story begins in the present time, with Dan, trying to find the woman he has never forgotten since he met her almost 70 years ago….
Stella Thorne and Dan Rosinski meet by chance and fall in love by accident. Theirs is a reluctant, unstoppable affair in which all the odds are stacked against them: she is newly married, and he is an American bomber pilot whose chance of survival is just one in five.
...He promised to love her forever
Seventy years later Dan makes one final attempt to find the girl he has never forgotten, and sends a letter to the house where they shared a brief yet perfect happiness. But Stella has gone, and the letter is opened by Jess, a young girl hiding from problems of her own. And as Jess reads Dan's words, she is captivated by the story of a love affair that burned so bright and dimmed too soon. Can she help Dan find Stella before it is too late?
Now forever is finally running out.
He sends a letter to her to the last address he has of hers. The letter is discovered by Jess Moran, a homeless young woman living in secret in an abandoned house in London.
This discovery will lead to Jess finding the letters Dan wrote to Stella, the woman he has never stopped loving, and take her on a journey that will grab your heart.
The complex plot weaves between London during the Second World War and the present day and where we meet two couples, Dan & Stella and Jess & Will.
Dan & Stella’s beautiful and powerful love story that lasts despite a lifetime spent apart…a story of loss, lies, betrayal and hope.
I couldn’t put this book down….and by the end…reading the last page…I totally broke down…tears running down my cheeks…my son asking me why I was crying…..jeezzz….(view spoiler)
So, if you have been reading and reached this line so far…I just want to share, very quickly, a story about a family member that reminded me of this book…
My husband’s uncle was an officer during the war and he was given the task to inform a woman that her husband had been shot down and disappeared in Italy. But the woman, Ina, could not accept that her husband had been killed. She got on a ship from Cape Town to London, a train to Italy – where he husband had been last seen….hired someone to drive her to all the towns and cities in the area where he was suppose to have been shot down…over a few months…but of course, she never found him. She sailed back to Johannesburg….the uncle, Nick, had in the meantime, never forgotten her and he reconnected with her when she returned. Their friendship grew during the next few years and Nick asked Ina to marry him. But she refused. However, she agreed to live with him…..because if her husband ever returned, she would go back to him….sadly, her husband never did, Nick and Ina never married, never had children. They had a good life together, but Ina always lived all those years and years in hope of her husband, which apparently she had loved beyond anything, to come back to her!!! Nick died before Ina…Ina continued waiting and hoping…finally dying when she was 93. I often wondered about the kind of love she had for her husband that kept her hopes alive all those years!!!!
So, back to this book. Please, if you love a beautiful and poignant and haunting love story that will grab your heart…get this book.
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