A young woman is captured and tortured by the Gestapo. She agrees to write down all she knows but is her confession the truth? This WW2 spy story is nothing short of superb! It kept me guessing all the way through to the devastating yet exhilarating climax - a great story with unforgettable characters. Kirsty, Waterstones Ayr

I love stories told in two parts, from different narrative viewpoints, and that is just one of many many things to love about this book. The first half is told by 'Verity', a captured female spy being interrogated by the Gestapo in a former hotel in France. She begin her story with the words, 'I am a coward,' but you don't have to read much further before you realise this simply isn't true. Tortured, threatened and terrified, Verity proves her courage again and again. Under the cover of writing a confession for her captors, she tells the story of how she came to be a spy, how she met her best friend, Maddie ('It's like falling in love, finding your best friend') and how the pair of them came to be in France. 'We're a sensational team', Verity tells us. It's this friendship that drives the story, as we try to piece together the clues in Verity's confession - being made in extremis - to get at the exact truth of what happened to the sensational team. Elizabeth Wein lays many excellent traps for the reader along the way; expect to have your heart in your mouth a lot of the time. Is Verity really betraying her country (Scotland, not England)? Is she going to die? Is her best friend already dead, or in terrible danger? Will the two young women ever see one another again? Midway through, the story switches to Maddie's voice. This is the tricky point at which an author can lose a reader, especially one who's fallen in love, the way she helps us fall in love with Verity. But it only takes a couple of pages for us to love Maddie, too, and to marvel at how distinctly different her voice is to Verity's. These women are alive. They leap off the page and grip you by the hand, and then the heart. You desperately want them to have a happy ending, but at the same time you sense it would be cheating, or lying, to arrive at this after the harrowing and entirely believable scenes which have unfolded. To move the reader without resorting to sentiment. To arrive at an ending that is both honest and uplifting. To make you think afresh about a part of history you thought you knew. To transport you, for the time it takes to read the book, to a different time and another world, while showing you so clearly why these stories matter and how they can resonate. These are proofs positive of a gifted, compassionate and generous author. I doubt I'll read a better book this year.

Code Name Verity is an absolutely exceptional piece of storytelling; Elizabeth Wein has worked a thing of magic. Not only does it have a wonderfully constructed plotline, it brings alive the smells, tastes and sounds of wartime Britain, and reminds me of the unrivalled and uncommon courage of those who served their country at this time. This is the story of two young women who, if not for the Second World War, would most probably have never met. It is told in two parts: Verity’s tale, and then Maddie’s tale. It is France, 1943, and Verity, after an infuriatingly simple cultural blunder, has been caught by the Gestapo. It is apparent from the beginning that she has been tortured and that what we are reading is her written confession to her captors, a promise to provide information on the British war effort to appease her German interrogator and hopefully bring some improvement to her living conditions. The story that she tells, though, is one of friendship, her friendship with Maddie, the pilot who brought her to France, and their story up until this moment in time. It is brilliantly written and utterly gripping, but what stood out strongest for me, what has remained with me after I put the book down for the last time, are the ordinary and extraordinary acts of courage and heroism that these two women perform. This picture of war, of the places where it leads humans – good and bad, physical and mental – is one that, sitting in my dry, well-heated, soft and comfortable home, I am apt to forget. Verity and Maddie’s determination is astounding. Code Name Verity itself makes us question what is truth, honor, betrayal. It questions how far a person is willing to go to save the person they love – and even a person they don’t even know. I can’t begin to describe the layers, the hints and the games that Elizabeth Wein has written into this book without completely giving away the storyline or further rendering the experience of actually reading this book and figuring it out as you go along pointless. And so I say only this: read it. You will not be disappointed, it is as extraordinary as its characters. (Oh, and it's just been shortlisted for the 2013 CILIP Carnegie Medal)

Code Name Verity is a WWII spy novel following the lives of two young women - Verity and Maddie throughout their service with the WAAF (The Women's Auxiliary Air Force). Verity is an experienced and highly ranked spy who comes from high society, whereas working class Maddie knows only engines and aircraft but together they make a sensational team. With the book split into a duel narrative we first piece together the story from Verity’s diary entries and confessions whilst being held captive in occupied Ormaie, France, followed later by Maddie’s accounts. The book completely submerged me into wartime life and opened my eyes to what daily life might’ve looked like to millions of servicemen and servicewomen. The characters themselves were believable and the storyline twists and turns with such emotion and suspense (and hard truths) that it really sent home just how much we owe our wartime generation. But the story isn’t without parts of lightness and shows how life continued regardless of the world being at war. It was also really interesting to read an account of servicewomen during the war, both in the way of what amazing and vital operations that they were part of and also the flip side of how they were treated and seen, by and large, by others. Code Name Verity is a unique and hugely interesting book that represents the power of friendship and never giving up even if your whole world is shattering.

I love to read reviews of the book I've just finished reading because I'm inherently nosy, which is how I came across a comment from someone who decided to DNF this book not long after starting it because 'it was just about planes'. To each their own, but saying this book is just about planes is like saying Romeo and Juliet is just about daggers. This book made me weep the way I haven't wept over a book in a long while - in fact I spent the last 40-50 pages intermittently crying - and while I can't believe it's taken me so long to finally read this novel, I'm so glad I read it when I did. While I've always been a big historical fiction fan, and I've been rediscovering my love for the genre quite a bit this year, I don't usually gravitate towards WW2 fiction. It's a major generalisation, I know, but so much WW2 historical fiction I come across online, in bookshops, or in libraries is either Holocaust trauma porn or some kind of romance that leans a little too 'wasn't everything so good back in the day and weren't America and Britain so perfect?' for my tastes. It's a period I've been gravitating towards more and more in recent years, though. Gee, I wonder what it is about recent politics that's made me want to read about the last time the world was fighting fascism. Code Name Verity is the kind of YA novel that felt as though it became an instant classic from the moment it was published back in 2012. I've heard nothing but praise for it over the past 14 years, and my copy has waited patiently for me on my shelves for the last decade. This has become an instant favourite for me. Part of me wants to dive back in and reread it immediately - I've also heard the audiobook's brilliant - and another part of me never wants to read it again because ow it hurts. A British prisoner, captured by the German military in Nazi-occupied France, agrees to tell her captors everything she knows in exchange for a few more weeks of life. She doesn't really tell her story, though, but the story of her best friend Maddie, the pilot who flew her to France. What follows is a masterful example of well done historical fiction. Elizabeth Wein knows exactly what to say, and exactly what to leave out, to convey the horrors of the Nazi regime. Not only does she trust her reader, but she also knows that it's the personal that makes people care. We all know the unspeakable hideousness of the Second World War, but the things we love, and the things that break our heart most, are the stories of the ordinary people who chose to be brave when doing so could quite literally be a death sentence. And not necessarily a quick death at that. The friendship at the heart of this book, the love these two girls have for each other, only makes the cruelty of their situation all the more gut-wrenching, and yet also fills every page with the kind of dogged hope that makes us get up the morning after a rubbish day. This is the kind of novel that will make you want to squeeze your friends tightly. I realise I've said quite a bit while saying very little - a true skill of mine; I work in marketing - but that's mostly because this is the kind of novel you have to experience. I went into it knowing practically nothing about it and I urge you to do the same. It's hopeful and haunting in equal measure, and it's going to haunt me for a long time.