The Shadow Readers

Some secrets aren't hidden in code. They're hidden in shadows — and only the right eye can read them.

Cornwall, 1942. Tamsin Trevannion has always seen too much. As a girl on the quay, she read distress in a smudge of grey no one else believed until three men drowned. She has spent her life since learning the first hard lesson of her uncanny gift: it is not enough to see. You must be believed. And a vicar's daughter with a painter's eye and a habit of being right is the last person a working man — or a wing commander — will trust against the comfortable evidence of his own eyes.

When the WAAF posts her to Hartswood Park, Tamsin expects a quiet war at a switchboard. Instead she finds a remarkable, half-hidden band of women bent over millions of aerial photographs, calculating the height of enemy structures from nothing but the length of a shadow — reading, in the smoke and strain of the night shifts, what no one was ever meant to see. Here, at last, her strange eye has a purpose. Here she is not a queer girl who imagines things. She is the one who finds what others miss.

Then, in a single smear of shadow on a reconnaissance print, she glimpses something monstrous — a secret that could level a city. The unarmed pilot who flew over the guns to bring her the picture believes her. The men in charge do not. To make them listen, Tamsin must stake her reputation, her heart, and far more than she ever agreed to give.

Iris Penhallow writes with the salt-and-granite lyricism of the Cornish coast and the taut nerve of the war it fed into. The Shadow Readers is a novel of quiet courage, guarded love, and the unsung women whose eyes changed the course of history.

For readers of Kate Quinn and Kristin Hannah. Discover the women who saw the unseen. One-click today.