The Dynamite Room

A young English girl is held captive in her house by a German soldier in this thrilling debut novel about the personal impact of war It's July 1940, and 11-year-old Lydia has just run away from life as a child evacuee in Wales to return home. Finding her English village abandoned, she breaks into her family's boarded-up house to wait for their return. But inside she discovers a wounded German soldier with a gun -- he says he won't hurt her, but he won't let her leave the house. Trapped in the claustrophobic confines of the house, Lydia slowly realizes that this soldier knows too much about her and her family, and that he's plotting something for them both. The Dynamite Room shrinks the global theater of history's most devastating war to a game of cat and mouse played out in a single house; the result is a moving portrait of war and how it affects soldiers and citizens alike.