Characters
Tom Calloway — British, Age 14
Tom grew up in Kensington, London, the eldest of three children in a house that smelled of pipe tobacco and his mother’s cooking. His father, Commander Robert Calloway of the Royal Navy, has been at sea so long that Tom hasn’t heard from him in over a year — a silence Tom carries with equal parts pride and quiet fear. Evacuated from London during the Blitz, Tom was sent to stay with distant relatives in rural France, and when the war followed him there, his search for safety led him to the door of a small bookshop on the Rue des Quatre Vents. Tom is the boy who always has a plan — bold, resourceful, and the first to step forward. Whether it’s always a good plan is another question, and learning the difference is the making of him.
Emil Brandt — German, Age 13
Emil grew up in Munich in an apartment that smelled of real coffee and old books, the only child of a philosophy professor and a piano teacher. His father was the most honest man Emil ever knew — so honest that he refused to go along with the Nazi regime, and was arrested for it when Emil was twelve. Emil escaped with the help of a neighbor and has been moving quietly through occupied Europe ever since, terrified of what will happen if anyone discovers he is German. He speaks four languages, notices everything, and misses nothing — the detail, the lie, the danger the others walk right past. Emil carries a shame about his country that was never his to carry, and his journey is learning that his true inheritance is not Germany’s crimes but his father’s integrity.
Luca Marino — Italian, Age 13
Luca comes from a fishing village near Genova, where his father fished, his mother baked bread every morning, and his older brother Marco taught him to handle a boat from the age of four. When Marco was conscripted into Mussolini’s army against his will, Luca ran — crossing the Alps on foot with a group of refugees (and one extremely competent goat) until the road brought him to Lyon. Luca is loud, funny, fiercely loyal, and almost recklessly brave: the first to laugh, the first to act, and the first to get everyone into trouble. He is also the first to give away his own bread without being asked. His warmth can disarm even the most guarded person in the room — and his greatest lesson is that sometimes the bravest thing he can do is pause.
Pieter van Dijk — Dutch, Age 12
Pieter grew up in a tall, narrow canal house in Amsterdam that leaned slightly to the left and held three generations of family — a printer father with a passion for typefaces, a mother who taught music with the windows open in summer, and a large grey cat with strong opinions. When his parents were taken, Pieter escaped with his older sister Marta, and their long, dangerous journey south ended in the cellar beneath a Lyon bookshop. Pieter is the youngest of the five and feels it, but what he lacks in size he makes up for in an uncanny gift for reading people. He notices when something is emotionally wrong before anyone else does, and he is the glue that holds the group together — even when holding it together means learning that real love sometimes requires honesty over comfort.
Alek Nowak — Polish, Age 14
Alek was ten years old when he watched the German invasion of Poland from his family’s fourth-floor apartment on Warsaw’s Marszałkowska Street. His father was a master cabinetmaker whose workshop smelled of sawdust and linseed oil; his mother taught mathematics and could not abide imprecision. When his parents were taken while he was out on an errand, Alek made his way alone across a continent at war, surviving by his wits until he reached Lyon — a city whose streets, alleys, and hidden places he now knows better than anyone. He found Madame Colette’s bookshop long before the others arrived, which makes him the veteran of the cellar and the hardest of the five to earn trust from. He carries a small stone in his pocket, reads books about migratory birds, and says exactly what he means — which is why, when Alek finally gives his trust, it means everything.
Madame Colette Renard — French, Age 68
Madame Colette is a retired teacher turned bookseller who has run the little shop on the Rue des Quatre Vents for thirty years — and, for the last four, something more than a bookshop. She and her husband Henri built a resistance waystation behind its shelves together; since his death in the spring of 1941, she has carried the work alone. Small, sharp, unhurried, and entirely undeceived by anyone, she is the woman who calmly hid five frightened boys from five different nations in her cellar and told them the only thing that mattered: be quiet, be still, and trust each other. She never lectures and never moralizes — she simply lives by the three rules of her house: “In this house we do not lie. We do not steal. And we do not give up on each other.” She always finishes the sentence she is reading before she looks up. And she is never just reading her book.