The Ventriloquists: A Novel

Summary

Inspired by true events, this sweeping WWII novel tells the incredible story of a ragtag gang of resistance fighters—including a misfit journalist, a forger, and a young street urchin—who go to extraordinary lengths and risk their lives to publish a satiric newspaper mocking the Reich, pitched as All the Light We Cannot See meets Ocean’s Eleven.

Brussels, 1943. Orphaned when the Nazis invaded, twelve-year-old street urchin Helene survives by living as a boy and selling copies of the country’s most popular newspaper—Le Soir, now turned into Nazi propaganda like so many others. Helene’s entire world changes when she befriends a misfit journalist, Marc Aubrion, who draws her into the Front de l’Indépendance, a secret network of resistance fighters publishing dissident underground newspapers.

Aubrion’s unbridled creativity and linguistic genius attracts the attention of August Wolff, a high-ranking Nazi official tasked with swaying public opinion against the Allies. Wolff captures Aubrion and his comrades and gives them an impossible choice: use the voice of the resistance to paint the Allies as monsters, or be killed. Faced with no decision at all, Aubrion has a brilliant idea—he, Helene, and his fellow condemned resistance writers will pretend to do the Nazi’s bidding, all the while writing and distributing a fake edition of Le Soir. This faux Soir will mock the Reich, poke fun at Hitler and Stalin, and give power back to the Belgians by daring to laugh in the face of their oppressors.

The ventriloquists have agreed to die for a joke, and they have only eighteen days to tell it.

Told with dazzling scope, taut prose and devastating emotion, The Ventriloquists illuminates the extraordinary acts of courage by ordinary people forgotten by history—unlikely heroes who risked everything to orchestrate the most elaborate feat of satire Europe has ever seen.