Join us the first Wednesday of each month at 7 p.m. to discuss compelling books of all genres. Books purchased for our book clubs are always 20% off. Please email Sally Chadbourn for more information and to join.

This month, we are reading The Saboteur, a fast-paced and emotionally intuitive spy thriller, which illuminates an unsung hero of the French Resistance during World War II.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A scion of one of the most storied families in France, Robert de La Rochefoucauld was raised in a magnificent chateau and educated in Europe’s finest schools. When the Nazis invaded and imprisoned his father, La Rochefoucauld escaped to England and learned the dark arts of anarchy and combat—cracking safes and planting bombs and killing with his bare hands—from a collection of British spies, beloved by Winston Churchill, who altered the war in Europe with their covert tactics. With his newfound skills, La Rochefoucauld returned to France and organized Resistance cells, blew up fortified compounds and munitions factories, interfered with Germany’s wartime missions, and executed Nazi officers. Caught by the Germans, La Rochefoucauld withstood months of torture and escaped his own death sentence, not once but twice.

The Saboteur recounts La Rochefoucauld’s enthralling adventures, from jumping from a moving truck on his way to his execution to stealing Nazi limos to dressing up in a nun’s habit—one of his many disguises and impersonations. Whatever the mission, whatever the dire circumstance, La Rochefoucauld acquitted himself nobly, with the straight-back aplomb of a man of aristocratic breeding: James Bond before Ian Fleming conjured him.