Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In the cold December of 1914, a nineteen-year-old girl in an ugly, wealthy Pennsylvania city sits knitting by the fire, certain that life has no particular outlook in store for her. Her name is Sara Lee Kennedy, and she is about to do something that everyone she loves believes is impossible: cross an ocean at war to set up a humble soup kitchen for wounded Belgian soldiers, just behind the firing line. The stage on which we play our small dramas, the author tells us, usually has but one setting. For Sara Lee, the back drop is about to lift on a forest of adventure she would never have recognized as a forest, and a prince as strange and mysterious as it.

Mary Roberts Rinehart knew this world first-hand. One of America's most beloved storytellers and a pioneering mystery writer, she reported from the Belgian front during the First World War, walking the trenches and field hospitals that fill these pages. The Amazing Interlude (1918) pours that hard-won truth into a tender, suspenseful romance: a tale of mercy and courage, of a watchful young Belgian officer named Henri whose secret work cannot be spoken aloud, and of a faithful suitor waiting at home in America.

The novel endures because it asks a quietly radical question, gentle Sara Lee's own: what is the use of a peace bought at no price? Its answer is an unforgettable interlude carved out of catastrophe, where soup, candlelight, and stolen hours mean more than they ever could in peacetime.

Step now through the lifted back drop. The illustrated gallery that follows introduces the cast, maps their world, and gathers the moments that turn a small life into something amazing.