SOURCE: “Penelope Fitzgerald: A Voice amidst the Blitz,” in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 246, No. 20, May 17, 1999, p. 51.

In the following review, Charters provides a brief overview of Fitzgerald’s life and career and how the author’s experience working at the BBC during World War II provided the basis for Human Voices.

On June 14, 1940, four days after the fall of Paris to Hitler, the British public learned of the successful escape to London of General Georges Pinard, writes Penelope Fitzgerald in Human Voices, a novel about her job as an assistant at the wartime BBC. Pinard, “a romantic, a Dreyfusard, and a devotee of the airplane,” was famous as the commander of the last counterattack against the German advance. When he offered to give a radio address, the BBC quickly accepted. Once behind the microphone, however, Pinard urged the British to surrender, thundering, “ne vous faites pas aucune illusion, you...