Glynis Peters on The Orphan's Mission | Behind the Book
Some stories begin in the most unlikely of places — not in grand archives or research libraries, but in the quiet discovery of your own hometown's hidden history.
For author Glynis Peters, it was submarines. Docked in Harwich, the English port town where she grew up, French-speaking sailors had gathered in the early years of the Second World War. A detail she hadn't known was there — until it was. And once she found it, she couldn't let it go.
That small, local discovery became the seed of something much larger. And what grew from it stayed with her long after the final page.
A History That Was Already There
Glynis has long been drawn to the French Resistance — not the organized, well-documented movement most readers know, but the earlier, messier, more dangerous question that preceded it: What made ordinary people decide to resist at all?
How did they find each other when every meeting put them at risk? What compelled someone to step forward when the cost of being betrayed could mean their life?
Those questions pulled her deep into research. And then she looked closer to home — and found the French sailors already there, moored in the harbor of the town she'd grown up in.
That connection, between a local historical detail and a much larger human question, became the heart of The Orphan's Mission.
A Young Woman Alone in a World at War
The novel follows Lucy Levine, a young woman in her late teens who is, at the story's opening, without parents, without a stable home, and without a clear path forward. Her French-speaking father was killed just as the war began. Her mother disappeared. A grandmother who didn't understand her, an aunt she refused to go to — and then Lucy, on her own, returning to the coastal town of her childhood.
It's there that everything shifts.
When French sailors on the docks speak kindly of her and she responds in fluent French, she catches the attention of someone watching. Days later, a young man arrives with a proposition: will she carry a message into occupied France?
Lucy says yes. Not out of bravado, but out of something quieter — a hope that somewhere on the other side, she might find what happened to her family. That there might still be someone for her.
What follows is a story that moves quickly and pulls hard. Lucy is smuggled to the Hook of Holland, makes her way to a French airfield, and — with barely twenty minutes of instruction — jumps from a plane over occupied France. She lands in a tree, parachute tangled in the branches, and is found by the very man sent to receive her.
It's the kind of opening that sets the tone for everything to come.
If you prefer to watch or listen to our full conversation, you can view the Behind the Book interview below.
Hope as the Through-Line
What Glynis hopes readers carry away from this story is something she articulated simply and without hesitation: hope and love are what carry people through the darkest of times.
Not a fairytale resolution. Not an erasure of hardship. But the quiet, earned conviction that you can come out the other side.
Lucy doesn't begin the story as a hero. She begins it as a young woman who has lost almost everything — and who, in agreeing to carry a message she doesn't fully understand, finds herself part of something she didn't expect. A small pocket of people in occupied France who become, gradually and genuinely, her family.
That transformation — from isolated and vulnerable to deeply, unexpectedly belonging — is where the emotional weight of the novel lives.
The Line That Shaped the Ending
There's a moment Glynis shared that speaks to how a single image can guide an entire book. It's the opening line of an email Glynis sent to her editor. "Dear Emily, hanging by one leg from a parachute was not how I imagined I would meet a handsome Frenchman. And yet here I am."
It's wry. It's warm. And Glynis laughed as she described it — the vision of this young woman, upside down, trying to compose herself.
But that line wasn't just a charming detail. It became a quiet guide. It told Glynis who Lucy was, how she moved through the world, and — eventually — how the epilogue would unfold. Lucy, who had once dreamed of becoming an artist like her mother, would find her way back to that dream. The line about the parachute, the handsome Frenchman, the wry sense of humor — it held the shape of the ending long before Glynis reached it.
That's the kind of writing detail that reminds us how much a single sentence can carry.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Orphan's Mission about? It follows Lucy Levine, a young bilingual woman in wartime England who agrees to carry a message into occupied France. Alone and vulnerable, she finds her way into a small, unlikely family in the French countryside — and discovers more than she bargained for about her own past.
Is it based on a true story? The novel draws on real history — including the presence of French sailors in Harwich and the early formation of resistance networks in France — but Lucy and the story are fictional.
When was it published? The Orphan's Mission was released on April 2, 2026, and is available now at your favorite bookstore or through your local public library.
The Questions That Linger
What stays with me about this conversation is how much of the story began in questions Glynis couldn't let go of — about courage, about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, about what compels someone to risk everything.
The Orphan's Mission is a story born from those questions. And if you're drawn to historical fiction that honors both the weight of history and the resilience of the people living inside it, Lucy's story is worth finding.
You can watch the full Behind the Book conversation above — and if you'd like more conversations like this one, you'll find them here on the blog and over on Author Notes on YouTube.
For details about Glynis Peters and the novels she writes, head over to her website for more information.