The Other Side of the Bridge by Katherine Swartz Excerpt

The Other Side of the Bridge by Katherine Swartz
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Ava Lancet has lost her job, her marriage, and her baby when she discovers she has inherited her grandmother’s dilapidated farmhouse in a tiny village in central Greece. With the kind of emotional impulsiveness that has frustrated her stony-faced husband for years, she decides to move there and recover from life’s sorrows.

When an elderly woman in the village mistakes Ava for her grandmother, telling her, with tears trickling down her face, that she is sorry, Ava is both touched and intrigued. What is the woman sorry for, and what secrets did her grandmother keep? Soon Ava is discovering the surprising threads of her grandmother’s life, including her part in the local Resistance during World War Two and a forbidden love affair with a British SOE agent.

Spanning three generations and exploring the lives of two very different and yet surprisingly similar women, The Other Side of The Bridge will remind you how a fragile hope can spring from both tragedy and despair. Written by USA Today bestselling author Kate Hewitt, writing as Katharine Swartz.

Excerpt:

            Ava Lancet peered through the unrelenting night as she fought down a growing sense of panic. Darkness had fallen twenty minutes ago and she had no idea where she was—or where she was meant to go.
            She glanced at the map crumpled on the passenger seat of her rental car, wishing that the agent had provided a GPS instead of the seemingly obsolete, old-fashioned fold-out map that he’d assured her would help her drive from Athens to the tiny village of Iousidous. And perhaps it would have if she could have made any sense of the wiggly lines and incomprehensible Greek names. Not that reading Greek even mattered now, because as darkness had fallen she could barely make out the road signs on Greece’s National Highway.
            She’d been in this country for just a few hours and already she was completely lost, both literally and figuratively. Spiritually, emotionally, hopelessly lost. A fortnight ago, escaping a cold, wet spring in England had seemed like a wonderful idea, a desperate lifeline, since her own life—and marriage—had been put on hold. That’s how Ava liked to think of it anyway, because to consider anything else was too final. Too much of a failure.
            She drew a deep breath, her fingers clenched around the steering wheel, her knuckles whitening, and she craned her head forward in an attempt to read one of the road signs that loomed out of the darkness. At first the Greek letters looked like so much nonsense, squiggly hieroglyphics, despite her crash course in Greek—ten hours worth of audio CDs, and countless more hours poring over textbooks. Yet as she continued to squint hopefully through the darkness, she saw the Roman alphabet printed underneath and felt a wave of relief. Iousidous. It would be her home for the foreseeable future.