It is the summer of 1946 --- one year to the week that the atomic
bomb was dropped on Nagasaki --- and three 17-year-old English
girls sit in a Yorkshire graveyard contemplating their future in a
world so recently torn apart by war. The girls, Hetty, Una, and
Lieselotte, have gathered in the churchyard, having just heard the
news that they've each received full state scholarships to
University in October --- Hetty to the University of London, and
Una and Lieselotte to Cambridge. Having reached maturity during the
lean, uncertain years of World War II, and still living on food
rations and clothing coupons, the girls look forward to a bright
and promising future far away from Yorkshire but each inwardly
wonders if she is ready to let go of the familiarity of home and
face the challenges that await in a society struggling to rebuild
itself from the ground up. In the months before they set off for
college, each girl will face one last transformative lesson that
will prepare them for their new life.

Hester "Hetty" Fallowes was always thought to be the least likely
candidate for scholarship --- never considered clever by anyone and
labeled as an "unsteady, self-conscious, show-off" by teachers,
Hetty seemed destined to replicate the stifling, domestic life led
by her mother Kitty --- a life dominated by religious fervor and
gilded society luncheons. Kitty Fallowes had raised her daughter to
strive after the stringent goodness that she felt she herself had
failed at. Under her mother's guidance, Hester "was to be Kitty
perfected." Hetty's ambitions are suddenly raised when at age 16
she meets and falls for intellectual "older man" Eustace.
Twenty-one-year-old Eustace is a soldier in the Army Pay Corp who
has already secured a place at Cambridge upon his is release from
the army. Desperate to impress Eustace, and determined to join him
at university, Hetty throws herself into her studies and soars to
the top of her class. When she discovers Eustace has been writing
intimate letters to her mother on the sly, a confused Hetty sets
off on her own for a three week retreat in England's Lake District
where she hopes to gain independence and insight into her own
expectations for herself.

Unlike her best friend Hetty, quiet and confident Una Vane always
excelled in school. The daughter of a prominent doctor, there was
never any doubt that Una would find success in anything she put her
mind to. In her final year of school Una surprises everyone by
taking up company with Ray, a sharp-faced railroad employee from
the wrong side of the tracks who shares Una's love of cycling and,
like Una, is "economical with words." As Una and Ray's cycling
trips take them to increasingly secluded destinations along the
countryside, Una discovers that there just might be much more to
life than academic success.

Lieselotte Klein is by far the most complex of the three girls, and
her journey perhaps the most important. Since arriving from Hamburg
on the Kindertransport in 1939, she was always considered by her
classmates to be "too alarming, too mysterious, and too brilliant
to be anybody's friend." Up until the day she is awarded the
scholarship that unites her in a common bond with Una and Hetty, no
one ever really paid any attention to her. When just days after
receiving her award Lieselotte is suddenly and inexplicably sent to
live with an elderly couple in London, who tell her they have
adopted her, Lieselotte is prompted into questioning what happened
to her own family back in Germany. She begins a quest that takes
her all the way to the California shore, where she must decide
whether to place her trust in a stranger who may or may not have
her best interests at heart.

THE FLIGHT OF THE MAIDENS satisfies as a perfect summer read filled
with genuine humor and heartache. Two-time Whitbread Award winner
Jane Gardam effortlessly transports her readers back in time to a
precarious era in history where the old rules no longer apply but
the new have yet to be written. This one should serve to win Gardam
many new fans on this side of the Atlantic.