Ruth Druart Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Ruth Druart is a historical fiction author from the Isle of Wight where she used to spend many days reading and swimming on the beach as a child. These remain her favorite pastimes even as an adult.
Before Druart became a full-time author, she was a teacher at Marymount International School. She would also get a masters in International Education and the themes she used to focus on would become central in “Paris Slept” her debut novel.
The troubled and rich past of the city of lights was so interesting that she knew she had to come up with a story to put it all out.

Both of Ruth Druart’s works are set in Paris during the Second World War. They are all about families and people and in fact, her second novel was inspired by the story of Wolfgang, her great-uncle.

Like many authors, Ruth Druart began writing when she was a preteen. Aged just eleven, she penned a story about a girl that was gifted a monkey for her birthday.

After graduating from high school, she went to Leicester University where she studied psychology. She would then graduate and begin a career as a trainee management consultant at PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
But right from the first day, she was certain that this was not where she wanted to be. She worked for the organization for two years so that she could save some money and pay off her student loan.
With enough money, she would do the TOEFL and then head abroad to teach English. Nonetheless, she only ended up in Paris, where she would ultimately marry a French man.

While she found love in Paris, her dream of becoming an author would take a long time before it came true.

It was almost eighteen years before she published “While Paris Slept” since she was juggling raising three boys, teaching full time, and learning to write all at the same time.

Ruth Druart had arrived in Paris hardly knowing any French and had a lot to learn about its culture and the country in general. However, what struck Ruth the most were the constant reminders of the Second World War.
All over Paris were plaques commemorating the many resistance fighters and the families of the Jews that had been taken away to concentration camps.

She was intrigued by that era in history and how people coped either by collaborating or resisting. Still, she knew that for most people it was all about surviving and getting by.
She began reading the accounts of German soldiers, Jews who lived in the occupation period, and harrowing accounts of the Holocaust.

When she got her third son, she used to wake up in the middle of the night to breastfeed him.

This was the time her imagination used to run wild and she began cultivating the seed of an idea that would turn into While Paris Slept.
By the time her child was weaned, she had compiled enough tidbits and notes that she was now ready to tell it.

She focused on themes such as a sense of belonging and parental love as the story culminates in a terrible moral dilemma.

Ruth Druart’s novel “While Paris Slept” is set in Paris in 1944 and introduces the lead as Jean-Luc Beauchamp. He is a man that has been employed at the French Railway Department ever since he was just fifteen.
But in the present, the department has been taken over by the Germans and now Jean-Luc and his colleagues have to work next to Drancy, the concentration camp.

The trains are usually full of Jews being sent to concentration camps and they find it unbearable. Things turned interesting when one morning, a young female prisoner thrust a baby into his hands and begged that he keep it safe.
He had taken the month-old baby and somehow cared for it until he got married. A decade later, he was living in California with Charlotte, his wife, and Sam, their adopted son.
While they are living a very safe and happy life in Santa Cruz, they have never forgotten the war and Paris.

They had been well settled in the US where they had made friends and learned English until two officers of the United Nations Commission on War Crimes arrived on their doorstep.
They took in Jean-Luc for questioning leaving the family in limbo. As far as they knew, they had not done anything wrong.

It is a heartbreaking story that is told in different voices and in two different time frames, even as the power of love clearly stands out.

Ruth Druart’s “The Last Hours in Paris” is a Second World War saga which explores issues of retribution, justice and parenthood.

The work is set in two timelines as it happens in the 1960s and the 1940s. The book opens in 1963 where the lead is a woman named Elise who has been living in a village in Breton far away from her roots in Paris.
She is living with her eighteen year old daughter Jospehine in the home of Soizic, a mysterious old woman. At some point Josephine, her daughter, realizes that her father is a German man when she finds her birth certificate.
She is angry with her mother who had always told her that her father was a French man who died during the Second World War.

Her parentage is a source of danger and even disgrace and she is angered by her mother’s deception and is now determined to find her father.
She learns that in 1944, her mother Elise and her sister had been living under Nazi occupation for at least four years.

Elise had been part of an underground organization that helped Jewish children to get out of France and into Switzerland.

At a bookshop, her mother had met a bilingual soldier named Sebasian who had a French mother and hence could speak French and German.

He hates that he has to work as an interpreter for the Gestapo and at some point, he intervened when Police harassed Elise at the bookshop.
Over time, he takes even greater risks to win her love and trust, as he saves kids from being sent to the camps and rescues her from the Gestapo.