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Booked for the Day

Postmistress by Sarah Blake

If you were wondering if there really was a Frankie Bard, there was not. But Sarah Blake took her inspiration for the character from a real-life war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn who covered World War II along with many of the other military conflicts of the 20th century.

"War happens to people one by one," is the Gellhorn quote that opens Blake's novel, and Frankie shares both Gellhorn's sense of despair and her worry that the stories she tells are not resonating with listeners back in America, for whom the war, in the early 1940s, was still a distant concern. There are several biographies on Martha Gellhorn if you are interested:

Gellhorn : a twentieth-century life by Caroline Moorehead   

Nothing ever happens to the brave :the story of Martha Gellhorn by Carl Rollyson

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