The Code of Love

Book excerpt: For fifty years, Pamela Kirrage longed to unlock the secrets of her husband’s encrypted war diary. She was on the verge of giving up when she at last found a mathematician who became as obsessed with learning the secrets of the diary as she was. After months of painstaking investigation, he was finally able to crack the code, and in the process uncover the ending to an extraordinary World War II romance. Pamela fell in love with RAF pilot Donald Hill in the summer of 1939, just a few months before he was sent to fight in Pacific. Although they planned to marry soon, Donald was captured after siege of Hong Kong and spent the next four years in a Japanese POW camp. Donald ultimately returned to Pamela, but he was never able to tell her about those lost years–and Pamela became convinced that the key to their happiness lay within the mysterious diary he brought back from the war. In The Code of Love Andro Linklater uses the decoded diary as well as extensive research and interviews to paint a vivid portrait of the World War II era, turning this dramatic love story into an inspiring, unconventional epic.