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1941

Seventeen-year-old Kitty is determined to ‘do her bit’. She dreams of singing to the soldiers like her heroine, Vera Lynn, and wangles her way into ENSA. Three weeks later she and the entertainment troupe are sweltering in an army camp in Cairo.

Under a desert sky Kitty steps out on to the make-shift stage for the first time, and is paralysed with fear. Help comes from the handsome Ruggero Andreotti – an Italian prisoner of war and ex-aide to Mussolini. But Italians are the enemy – and the worst thing a young woman can do is to fraternise with them.

However, the war has other plans for Kitty. She steps on to a very different stage when she is selected to undertake an unexpected and unwelcome mission and has no choice but to obey orders, knowing full well it could jeopardise her future happiness.

Will she and her love meet again some day?

Denise Barnes has unpacked her suitcases in several countries. These life-changing events have found their way into many of her stories, both fiction and non-fiction. In 2008 she self-published from Bad to Wurst: Bavarian Adventures of a Veggie Cook, a light-hearted travel memoir.

Denise ran her own chain of eight estate agents for 17 years and in 2005 sold (unwittingly!) to two conmen. She wrote her nightmare story Seller Beware: How Not To Sell Your Business, as a warning on how easily one can be conned (Biteback Publishing 2013).

Denise writes under the pen-name Fenella Forster for her fiction. The Voyagers trilogy is a saga stretching from 1913–2012. Book 1: Annie’s Story (2015) and Book 2: Juliet’s Story (2016), are both set mainly in Australia in 1913 and 2005 respectively. Book 3: Kitty’s Story (2017) is set mainly in Cairo 1941. Each novel is a standalone although they are linked. Annie’s Story achieved the American award, BRAG (Book Readers Appreciation Group) Gold Medallion. The trilogy is published by SilverWood Books.

She contributed to the USA best-selling ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’ series in their anthology The Joy of Less (2016). Denise’s story, ‘The Challenge’, was a featured highlight of Good Morning America.

Denise is currently writing a new series set in WW2 for HarperCollins under the pen-name Molly Green. The first is An Orphan in the Snow (November 2017).

"Kitty’s Story is a captivating romance with well-researched period detail."

– Jean Fullerton

"Fenella Forster takes readers on a breath-taking journey full of stunning period detail from Blitz-torn Britain to the deserts of Egypt, weaving a captivating love story in which passion wars with duty and courage defies betrayal."

– Joanne Walsh

"I lapped up this book. At its heart is Kitty, courageous, a little outrageous but, at just seventeen, quite innocent. It is 1941, and from her home town she’s off to London in the hope she’ll learn to sing, see the world and help the war effort…probably in that order. What follows is not only a roar of a story, but something that warms the heart. At the end, Juliet, who we meet in book 2 of Fenella Forster’s Voyagers trilogy, has finally tied up the pieces of her past. A remarkable feat and a must-read."

– Nina Milton

Take a look at the Advance Information (AI) sheet here.