USA Today Bestselling Author: Susan Meissner

by ELYSIAN Magazine April 22, 2020

SUSAN MEISSNER

Susan Meissner is the USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction with more than half a million books in print in fifteen languages. Her novels include As Bright as Heaven, which received a starred review from Library Journal; Secrets of a Charmed Life (a 2015 Goodreads Choice award finalist); and A Fall of Marigolds, named to Booklist’s Top Ten women’s fiction titles for 2014. She is also a RITA finalist and Christy Award and Carol Award winner. A California native, she attended Point Loma Nazarene University. She and her husband are the parents of four young adults.

The Last Year of War:

Susan Meissner’s new novel, “The Last Year of the War,” reveals long-buried details of WW2 German-American internment and secret prisoner exchanges.

In this unforgettable novel described by Publishers Weekly as written with “vivid historical detail and elegant prose,” Elise Sontag’s typical American teenager world is turned upside down when her German-immigrant father, a legal US resident for nearly two decades, is arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer. Her family’s subsequent internment in a distant Texas camp; her befriending there a kindred soul in Mariko, a California teenager of Japanese parents; and then the Sontags’ forced repatriation to Germany in 1945 in a prisoner exchange become the crucible in which Elise’s young identity is forged and then tested.

This is a story about what it means to be a patriot, but more importantly, it is a story about what it means to be human and what it looks like to view others through the lens of humanity rather than fear; a relevant story for our times.

The Last Year of War is an emotional tour de force, an indispensable historical record of a little-known WW2 event, and a touching tribute to the power and joy and persistence of friendship.