Carla van Beers’ story begins when she finds a mysterious English diary from the Second World War in a secondhand shop in her native Netherlands. She delivers a mixture of intrigue and investigations as she describes her quest to trace the diary’s author. The diary was written in England, and maintained religiously throughout 1944. It has been transcribed in it’s entirety, and at the end of each week Beers shares what she has discovered along with any hypothesis she has made.

Beers includes her efforts to identify where the diary was written, and her journey to visit the area. She leaves her native Netherlands and arrives in England fuelled with enthusiasm, yet at the same time feels a certain anxiety about the success of her endeavours.

This is a slim book, and features a few black and white photos of the diary, a list of sources and literature of the background reading, a page of websites that I would have preferred to been written in a list format, and a series of acknowledgements.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and eagerly await any potential book two.

This review was published in the October issue of Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine.

You can read the blog associated with the book HERE.