The Enemy’s Wife

Deborah Swift

AFTER a year spent fleeing from country to country to escape the ruthless grip of the Nazis, young Polish Jew Zofia Kowalski thought she had finally found safety, ‘stillness’ and a place to call home with her beloved Japanese husband Haru in the city of Kobe.

But when Haru is unwillingly conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army, Zofia is evacuated as a foreign national to China where, along with the other Jewish refugees and some remaining Westerners, she finds herself far from home in Shanghai, trapped under the increasingly brutal Japanese occupation, and fearful that she will never see her husband again.

Bestselling Lancashire-based author Deborah Swift, whose Secret Agents wartime trilogy thrilled fans and new readers alike, returns with The Enemy’s Wife, second heart-pounding book in her new trilogy, Survivors of War, which opened last year with Last Train to Freedom and captured hearts and minds on every second of the unforgettable journey with refugee Zofia. 

Swift (pictured below), who lives in Warton, near Carnforth, used to work backstage as a scenographer in many north-west theatres, including Liverpool Playhouse and The Duke’s theatre, Lancaster, and it is her imaginative flair, painstaking research, and keen eye for drama and authenticity, that has made her historical novels so viscerally real and exciting.

And she once more turns to a less familiar corner of the Second World War’s real history in this emotion-packed page-turner which explores the true story of wartime Shanghai where Jewish refugees, defenceless British and American citizens, and the native Chinese people found themselves stranded and at the mercy of the Japanese invaders.

It’s a story filled with privation, desperation, menace, resilience and resourcefulness as we follow a small but determined band of disparate people facing fear, loss and anguish but also the comforts of hope, friendship and love in their battle to survive in a hostile world.

In December of 1941, Zofia has been torn from her happy home and what she hoped was, at long last, a new life in Japan with her businessman husband Haru Kimura whom she married after a whirlwind romance. But with Haru now in the Japanese army, Zofia is regarded as an alien Jewish refugee and no longer welcome in the country, and has been transported to the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees in Japanese-occupied Shanghai where she is far from home, surrounded by a country at war, living in virtual poverty, and only just surviving.

Zofia has found unexpected comfort in a bond with Hilly Hoffman, a ‘half-child, half-adult’ 13-year-old refugee girl who escaped Nazi-occupied Austria after her parents were arrested and latched on to Zofia on the boat to China with the two of them now becoming inseparable. To make ends meet for them both, Hilly is earning coppers at a street news kiosk and Zofia is working as a home tutor to the two children of wealthy American shipping magnate Theo Carter who lives in the exclusive International Settlement enclave of Shanghai occupied by rich Westerners.

Meanwhile, in Japan, Haru is in training and learning the harsh lessons of what it’s like to be in ‘the cold brutal family of the Japanese army,’ a place of horrors where the message is that disobedience means not only ignominy, but also torture and death. And when Japanese troops take over the whole of China, violence tightens its grip on all parts of Shanghai and Theo arranges for his wife and children to leave the city while he stays behind to secure his lucrative business. Increasingly in mortal danger, Zofia and Hilly, whose blonde good looks seem to bring trouble in their wake, move in with Theo but with every passing day, the terrors of war and Haru’s absence begin to reshape Zofia’s world… and her heart. Can she still love someone who has become the enemy?

Shanghai proves to be a fascinating and breathtaking stage set for Swift’s new wartime thriller, providing a raw and revealing portrait of people whose lives were cruelly displaced and too often destroyed, and for whom the conflict brought daily challenges and deadly dangers that we can only imagine today. The sights and sounds of a city under siege become chillingly real as we witness the precarious existence of the brave and selfless Zofia, the naïve and wilful teenager Hilly, and wealthy, principled businessman Theo who is severely tested when he finds himself on the wrong side of Japanese law and in doing so, discovers the true meaning of endurance and of friendship.

For Haru Kimura, an intellectual steeped in Western culture, the war wreaks change of a very different kind when he is conscripted into the Japanese army. Embracing the Samurai warrior code means a soldier must never surrender and to comply with this, recruits are beaten into submission. As Haru transforms into one of Japan’s elite soldiers, he faces the risk of losing all his humanity.

Swift’s success as a historical novelist lies in the incredible depth and rich detail of her research, an aspect of her writing which she finds the most enjoyable and rewarding. And once again it is her immaculate rendering of time, place and people with such authenticity, intensity and emotional heft that marks out The Enemy’s Wife as one of this year’s most powerful and affecting reads.
(HQ, paperback, £9.99)