avg_rating: 3.68
name: Anita Ward
about: Anita Ward is a new author braving life on the island break of Jersey, among the southern Channel Islands, with her husband, David, mere minutes from some of the most astonishing island-shaping tides in the world. A Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators and having spent over fifty years working in the finance industry in Jersey, Anita has set her debut series on her home island of Jersey—along with several of the Channel Islands—as a stirring window into the past as she delves into its history around the time of the German occupation in World War II. During her long career, she found herself increasingly obsessed with words, not numbers, and one day she counted out 5,000 words of her intended novel for a contes Anita Ward is a new author braving life on the island break of Jersey, among the southern Channel Islands, with her husband, David, mere minutes from some of the most astonishing island-shaping tides in the world. A Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators and having spent over fifty years working in the finance industry in Jersey, Anita has set her debut series on her home island of Jersey—along with several of the Channel Islands—as a stirring window into the past as she delves into its history around the time of the German occupation in World War II. During her long career, she found herself increasingly obsessed with words, not numbers, and one day she counted out 5,000 words of her intended novel for a contest submission she read about in a newspaper article in the Daily Mail. She sent it in, still mesmerized by the idea of the novel as it continued to run around her head. Soon, this idea continued to captivate her as the world she had known only in reference to the finance world opened up to its former tense and hard times. The product was her first novel, ‘The French Secret,’ exploring a coming-of-age story shaped by war and danger. The historical fiction novel is a highly entertaining family saga set in pre- and post-war France, Britain and the USA that gives a very finely detailed and well-depicted portrayal of growing up and searching for meaning, coping with suffering, and discovering happiness despite a slew of dangerous liaisons in WWII, associated traumas, and secrets that permeate the lives of the Pape family. Since retiring in 2011, she and her husband have travelled extensively whenever she isn’t working on the second book of the series, engulfed in the Pape family secrets of the past. ...more