The Winter Guest / Pam Jenoff / 341 pages

The Winter Guest is a fiction World War II story told in the present and the past.  Twin eighteen year old sisters are raising their three young siblings in Nazi occupied Poland.  The children's father is dead and their mother is in a hospital after a mental breakdown.  An American plane crashes outside the village.  Helena, one of the twins, discovers an injured American paratrooper, Sam, from the plane in the woods while returning from visiting her mother in the hospital.  Helena manages to get the soldier into an abandoned chapel.  She continues to nurse him without telling her sister, Ruth.  Soon Sam and Helena fall in love and Helena helps Sam make contact with the Resistance to escape the Nazis.  The family's mother dies and family secrets are discovered that puts them in danger.  Sam and Helena make plans for the family to flee Poland.  Not everyone survives.