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Gardens of Stone: My Boyhood in the French Resistance

Extraordinary Lives, Extraordinary Stories of World War Two (Related to this series)

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What to expect

An extraordinary wartime memoir, combining the best kind of adventure story with a coming of age testimony of unforgettable resonance and poignancy.

September 2011, Halkidiki, Northern Greece.
A solitary 86 year-old man gazes across an Aegean headland, knowing that he must finally confront his past. He begins to write...

September 1939, Nieppe, Northern France.
14 year-old Stephen is living with his family, 25 kilometres from Ypres. His French mother battles with her encroaching blindness. Failing to escape the advancing German army, his English father can no longer look after the war graves that cast so heartbreaking a shadow across the region.

Stephen and his friend Marcel embark upon their great adventure: collecting souvenirs from strafed convoys and crashed Messerschmitts. But their world turns dark when arrested and imprisoned for sabotage and threatened with deportation or the firing squad. Upon his release, and still only 16, Stephen is recruited by the French Resistance. Growing up under the threat of imminent betrayal, he learns the arts of clandestine warfare, and - in a moment that haunts him still - how to kill...

Such was the impact of Stephen Grady's work for the French Resistance, (especially during the countdown to D-Day and its bloody aftermath) that he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the American Medal of Freedom.

(P)2013 Hodder & Stoughton

Critics Review

Remarkable...extraordinary.
Libby Purves, BBC Radio 4 Midweek
A heart breaking, beautifully crafted true story of courage, loss, loneliness and the reality of what it meant to fight the Occupation.
Kate Mosse, author of CITADEL
This is not only a remarkable coming of age story, it is also one of the finest memoirs of the war I have ever read. Stephen Grady brilliantly conveys the journey from childhood adventure to a far more sinister world where the threat of betrayal and torture lurks at every turn. At turns profoundly moving and grippingly tense, this book, like The Railway Man and First Light before it, deserves to become a classic.
James Holland, author of HELLFIRE
An extraordinary memoir of the journey to manhood unfolding against a backdrop of terror, destruction and stark tragedy. At times charmingly whimsical, at times almost unbearably poignant, Gardens of Stone is the best book I have read about the struggle of seventy years ago - and its haunting legacy - bar none.
Colonel Tim Collins
His heroism is of the very real kind...vividly recreates , in a simple and unadorned style, life under Nazi occupation.
Sunday Times
Stephen Grady has made his authorial debut at the age of 87 with a book that is thrilling, honest, funny and sad.
Spectator
British schoolboys doubtless have quite different fantasies nowadays, but for much of the last century most of them liked to imagine themselves leading their friends in guerrilla warfare against the German army. Stephen Grady is probably unique in having lived the fantasy, an experience he recalls in Gardens of Stone. Now he has made his authorial debut at the age of 87 with a book that is thrilling, honest, funny and sad.
Spectator
This terrifying and utterly gripping account.
Daily Mail
Author Stephen Grady and Michael Wright
Narrator Gordon Griffin, Luke Thompson
Series Extraordinary Lives, Extraordinary Stories of World War Two
Duration 12 hours and 20 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781444767544
Format Audiobook
Publisher Hodder & Stoughton
Genre Biography: general
Availability AU, GB, IE, US

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