GI Brides

GI Brides
Author: Duncan Barrett
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-09-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780062328052

For readers enchanted by the bestsellers The Astronaut Wives Club, The Girls of Atomic City, and Summer at Tiffany’s, an absorbing tale of romance and resilience—the true story of four British women who crossed the Atlantic for love, coming to America at the end of World War II to make a new life with the American servicemen they married. The “friendly invasion” of Britain by over a million American G.I.s bewitched a generation of young women deprived of male company during the Second World War. With their exotic accents, smart uniforms, and aura of Hollywood glamour, the G.I.s easily conquered their hearts, leaving British boys fighting abroad green with envy. But for girls like Sylvia, Margaret, Gwendolyn, and even the skeptical Rae, American soldiers offered something even more tantalizing than chocolate, chewing gum, and nylon stockings: an escape route from Blitz-ravaged Britain, an opportunity for a new life in affluent, modern America. Through the stories of these four women, G.I. Brides illuminates the experiences of war brides who found themselves in a foreign culture thousands of miles away from family and friends, with men they hardly knew. Some struggled with the isolation of life in rural America, or found their soldier less than heroic in civilian life. But most persevered, determined to turn their wartime romance into a lifelong love affair, and prove to those back home that a Hollywood ending of their own was possible. G.I. Brides includes an eight-pages insert that features 45-black-and-white photos.

The GI Bride

The GI Bride
Author: Iris Jones Simantel
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2013-05-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0718178084

Discover the remarkable memoir by GI Bride and bestselling author Iris Jones Simantel. Iris had escaped the Blitz but now lived in crippling poverty after the war - until a chance meeting changed her life. Aged just sixteen, she fell in love and married US soldier Bob Irvine. And soon after she set sail for a new life in America. It was the 1950s, the land of hope, dreams and Doris Day movies. But Iris ended up in a cramped Chicago bungalow, shared with Bob's parents. With a baby on the way and a husband turning daily into a stranger, Iris was wracked by homesickness. Trapped and desperately lonely, she had to make a fresh start, in a country where hope and opportunity thrived. In this dramatic sequel to the Sunday Times bestseller, Far From the East End, we follow young Iris Jones Simantel from London to New York, Chicago and Las Vegas in her struggle to find work, love and a sense of belonging in a foreign land. Iris Simantel is the acclaimed winner of the Saga Magazine 'Life Story' competition, beating several thousand entries to publish her first memoir Far From the East End. Iris grew up in Dagenham and South Oxhey (with an evacuation to Wales in between) before marrying her GI husband Bob and moving to Chicago. She now resides in Devon where she enjoys writing as a pastime.

Good-bye, Piccadilly

Good-bye, Piccadilly
Author: Jenel Virden
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1996
Genre: British Americans
ISBN: 9780252065286

Though the women came to the U.S. from all parts of the British Isles, they were an unusually homogeneous group, averaging 23 years of age, from working- or lower-middle-class families and having completed mandatory schooling to the age of fourteen. For the most part they emigrated alone and didn't move into an existing immigrant population.

Michigan: On the Trail of a War Bride

Michigan: On the Trail of a War Bride
Author: Frey Julien
Publisher: Europe Comics
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+02:00
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN:

When Julien arrives in Michigan to meet his wife's American family, he gets to know the American Midwest, as well as some unusual cousins. But above all, he meets Odette, his French great aunt with what one might call a resilient personality. Originally from Paris, she married an American soldier at the end of the Second World War. Like her, 200,000 other European "war brides" left behind their families and their countries to be with the G.I.s they loved.

The Ship of Brides

The Ship of Brides
Author: Jojo Moyes
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 459
Release: 2014-05-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 069815634X

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Giver of Stars and the forthcoming Someone Else's Shoes, a post-WWII story of the war brides who crossed the seas by the thousands to face their unknown futures 1946. World War II has ended and all over the world, young women are beginning to fulfill the promises made to the men they wed in wartime. In Sydney, Australia, four women join 650 other war brides on an extraordinary voyage to England—aboard HMS Victoria, which still carries not just arms and aircraft but a thousand naval officers. Rules are strictly enforced, from the aircraft carrier’s captain down to the lowliest young deckhand. But the men and the brides will find their lives intertwined despite the Navy’s ironclad sanctions. And for Frances Mackenzie, the complicated young woman whose past comes back to haunt her far from home, the journey will change her life in ways she never could have predicted—forever.

The G.I. Bride

The G.I. Bride
Author: Eileen Ramsay
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction Ltd.
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2018-09-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1785762443

If you love Donna Douglas' Nightingale Girls and the nurses of Nadine Dorries' Lovely Lane, be prepared to fall in love with April, Eugenie, Bess and Nancy as they band together to support each other through love, loss and scandal. In wartime, can new hope still be found? When her beloved father is killed in the Blitz, trainee nurse April Harvey is left all alone in the world. Desperate to find the family she craves, she heads to Truro, her mother's home town. But danger and heartbreak lurk even in Cornwall, and when the American G. I.s arrive, April finds her life turned upside down as she discovers that some people are not to be trusted. Especially when it comes to her budding romance with Major Crawford Dunbar. As vicious rumours emerge, April fears there will never be a future for them. But if war has taught her anything, it is that you must grasp happiness where you can, and April is not prepared to give up without a fight . . .

French War Brides

French War Brides
Author: Hilary Kaiser
Publisher:
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2017-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780984004331

Following both World War I and II, about 6,500 Franco-American marriages took place between French mademoiselles and American soldiers, be they "doughboys" or GI's. These women, who came from different parts of France and diverse background, would later cross the Atlantic to join husbands, settle in various corners of America, suffer culture shock, and adapt to marriage in a foreign land of postwar plenty with varying degrees of success. Despite these difficulties, like many other immigrants, they got on with it and survived. As the compelling oral histories in this book show, most of them did, in their own way, live the American dream.

Memories of a Big Sky British War Bride

Memories of a Big Sky British War Bride
Author: Irene Hope Hedrick
Publisher: TwoDot
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2005
Genre: British Americans
ISBN: 9780762739585

Irene Hope Hedrick writes Z99 candor and grace about her life as a British war bride in Montana Irene Hope met her serviceman husband in WWII England and came to the United States to live on the borders of the Salish-Kootenai Indian Reservation in the 1

The War Bride's Scrapbook

The War Bride's Scrapbook
Author: Caroline Preston
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-12-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062096885

A World War II love story, narrated through a new bride’s dazzling array of vintage postcards, newspaper clippings, photographs, and more Lila Jerome has never been very lucky in love, and has always been more interested in studying architecture and, more recently, supporting the war bond effort on the home front. But in the fall of 1943, a chance spark with a boarder in her apartment sets Lila on a course that shakes up all of her ideas about romance. Lila is intoxicated by Perry Weld, the charismatic army engineer who’s about to ship out to the European front, and it isn’t long before she discovers that the feeling is mutual. After just a few weeks together, caught up in the dramatic spirit of the times and with Perry’s departure date fast approaching, the two decide to elope. In a stunning kaleidoscope of vibrant ephemera, Lila boldly attempts to redefine her life in America as she navigates the heartache and longing of a marriage separated by ocean and war. In her second scrapbook novel after the lauded Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, Caroline Preston has once again pulled from her own extraordinary collection of vintage memorabilia, transporting us back to the lively, tumultuous 1940s and introducing us to an unforgettable, ambitious heroine who must learn to reconcile a wartime marriage with a newfound self-confidence.