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Laura Spence-Ash

Biography

Laura Spence-Ash

Laura Spence-Ash’s fiction has appeared in One Story, New England Review, Crazyhorse and elsewhere. Her critical essays and book reviews appear regularly in the Ploughshares blog. She received her MFA in Fiction from Rutgers-Newark, and she lives in New Jersey.

Laura Spence-Ash

Books by Laura Spence-Ash

by Laura Spence-Ash - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

As German bombs fall over London in 1940, working-class parents Millie and Reginald Thompson make an impossible choice: they decide to send their 11-year-old daughter, Beatrix, to America. Bea arrives in Boston to meet the Gregorys. Mr. and Mrs. G, and their sons William and Gerald, fold Bea seamlessly into their world. As Bea comes into herself and relaxes into her new life, the girl she had been begins to fade away…until she is called home to London when the war ends. Desperate as she is not to leave this life behind, Bea dutifully retraces her trip across the Atlantic back to her new, old world. As she returns to post-war London, the memory of her American family stays with her, always pulling on her heart as she tries to move on and pursue love and a life of her own.