Fire by Night: A Novel, The

Teresa Messineo

In war-torn France, Jo McMahon, an Italian-Irish girl from Brooklyn’s tenements, tends to six seriously wounded soldiers in a makeshift medical unit. Enemy bombs have destroyed her hospital convoy, and now Jo singlehandedly struggles to keep her patients and herself alive in a cramped and freezing tent close to German troops. There is a growing tenderness between her and one of her patients, a Scottish officer, but Jo’s heart is seared by the pain of all she has lost and seen. Nearing her breaking point, she fights to hold on to joyful memories—the times she shared with her best friend, Kay, whom she met in nursing school.