We Must Be Brave [Paperback] Liardet, Frances

It's 1940, and Ellen Parr finds a small girl asleep on an empty bus — abandoned, alone, and soon to become the center of her world. The child, Pamela, stays. For five years, Ellen raises her with fierce, protective love in a Hampshire village reshaped by war. Then Pamela's mother returns, and Ellen must let her go. Frances Liardet writes with quiet devastation about motherhood, loss, and the impossible choices women make when the world demands everything. This isn't a story about heroism — it's about endurance, about the weight of love that has nowhere to land. The prose is precise and unsentimental, the kind that gets under your skin without flash or melodrama. For readers who loved *The Nightingale* or *All the Light We Cannot See*, but want something more intimate, more brutal in its honesty.