A collection of private war letters would be posted on a website. At first, I couldn’t believe my luck: Almost every month, a new memoir was being published. How did the story move from historical documents to imagining something resonant today? Were there any surprises? Researching the war was both a blessing and a curse. But there's a lot to get right here, from the psychic toll of war to the attitudes of the time. The novel wears its research lightly the blood feels very red and real. Placing a woman at the center of my story-well, all of my novels have looked at women living or, more particularly, working in male worlds I like the unexpected pressures and powers that women discover in those spaces, the way they’re forced to define themselves. World War II, having earned a sort of historical gold star for being the morally unambiguous conflict of the 20th century, seemed a good starting point. What led you to set a novel during World War II, and how did the plot-and Juliet, who is so real I feel like I know her-come into being? I began work on this novel during the 2003 invasion of Iraq with little more than the desire-shared by many at that time-to understand the unanticipated consequences of war. Via e-mail, caught up with the Easter Island author about the uneasy legacy of “just war”-and how the birth of her daughter helped influence her most indelible character to date. There she encounters a combat-scarred deserter who may know something of her brother’s fate-just one of the elements of suspense in Vanderbes’s unputdownable third novel, which finds contemporary resonance in classic themes of humanity and loyalty tested by extremes.

When seventeen-year-old Juliet Dufresne receives a mysterious letter from her adored older brother, missing at the front, she lies about her age and enlists, landing a post as an army nurse at a field hospital north of Rome. It seems like no war has inspired more novels than World War II, but **Jennifer Vanderbes’**s The Secret of Raven Point(Scribner) is strikingly vivid, tackling war’s moral ambiguities from the open-eyed perspective of a young American woman on the cusp of adulthood.

Pääsiäissaari by Jennifer Vanderbes