Title Reveal!

Okay, I’ve never actually done a title reveal before…because usually I just talk about the books I’m writing, and I often just use the title as it ends up.

For my next World War 2 historical romance, which will come out in July of 2027, I’d been calling it The Memory of Freedom. I knew it was likely to change, though. It didn’t quite fit the others I’ve done with Tyndale, and I couldn’t for the life of me come up with something better. 

If you read my newsletters, however, you might remember me talking about it as I was writing. About how I structured this one a little differently, with scenes every few chapters from later in the war, when the heroine is in a concentration camp. In fact, the first chapter begins with her intake at Ravensbruck. So we know from the start where she ends up–and we see both how she got there and what shaped her into the person who becomes a leader, an inspiration, in the camp.

Don’t worry! As always, this book has a happy ending, I promise! 😉 And also as always, this “war book” has very little actual war in it, LOL. My reader friends and I were just talking about this recently.

So here’s the character board I was using for inspiration as I wrote the story–I’d already shared it in a newsletter, but if you haven’t seen it yet…

Amalie is my heroine, I just LOVE the contrast of those two photos–Amalie chic and soft and happy in Paris when the story begins in 1943. And then Amalie bold and brave and defiant in Ravensbruck in 1944. Same girl, same war. And yet what a change.

Amalie, you see, is a translator. She’s also a spy–gathering intelligence from the German military men she meets through her job with the French Indusrialists Syndicate. And what sets her apart is that she has perfect recall. Everything she sees. Everything she hears. Everything she’s ever done is filed away in her mind. My Amalie is based on a real person who did the very things I wrote about, and it’s her adventures I’m telling here through my fictional lens.

Jules, my hero, is also based on a real person. He and Amalie went to university together, fell out of touch, and then ran into each other on a train…where he recruited her into his intelligence work.

The other characters you see pictured here are Yves (pronounced Eve, but a traditional male name in French) and Rosette–also university chums; Trudie, the daughter of a German officer with whom Amalie becomes friends; and Helene, a comtesse whose mansion is a safe house for Jules’s intelligence cell, called the Druids.

My editor and I threw out ALL SORTS of words and images to try to find the perfect title for this one. Here are a few of our suggestions:

• Call
• Call Sign
• Sparrow
• Remembrance
• Informant
• Agent
• Operative
• Operation
• Translator
• Pact
• Project
• Network
• Target
• Agency
• Undercover
• Bureau
• Radar
• Waves
• Transmission
• Equation
• Science
• Formula
• League
• Baltic Islands
• Enemy Shores

So…are you ready to see what we decided on? I love it! Here it is!

The Translator’s War.

I love the simplicity of it. The to-the-point-ness. And it’s a perfect match to what the story is really about. Amalie was determined to use her skills with language to make a difference in the war. She sought out opportunities to help, refused to accept this was France’s future, and deliberately tossed herself “into the lion’s den,” as the real woman, Jeannie Rousseau, put it. This is one of those stories that it was an honor to tell, and I am so excited to see it come to life over the next year!

I just turned into my cover questionnaire for it, so I’ll have that to show you in a few months. For now…I’m so excited to have the title set and hope you love it just as much as I do!