ISLE is a 13-year-old half-Jewish girl who is sent out of Germany by her parents on the eve of the Second World War to live with her uncle Willy in Morocco.

Nicolai is a young teen in Hamburg, a reluctant member of the Hitler Youth, who struggles to make sense of what is happening to his family, his home, his homeland.

In this, her third novel, Charlesworth raids stories from her own family's past to make vivid the experience of war for these two children.

Although taking alternative chapters to tell the stories of Isle and Nicolai, it is the young girl's story which dominates.

It is a small criticism however, because, no matter how much more we would like to know about Nicolai's life, Charlesworth delivers a compelling docu-drama about the young Isle.

Her time in Morocco is brief. Willy's destiny is with the Foreign Legion and he has to return to mainland Europe to fight for France. Isle moves to Paris to meet with her father, Otto, a dissident whose main desire is to return to Germany to fight the Nazis and re-unite the family. His wife and Isle's mother is in Hamburg - working as a nanny for Nicolai's family.

This plot twist paves the way for all sorts of possibilities, but Charlesworth keeps the two stories separate: again, another frustration in the narrative.

In France, Isle struggles to survive. Without the correct papers, she and her father play cat and mouse with the occupying German forces. They settle in Marseilles, where they take refuge in a brothel, and Isle joins the resistance.

Charlesworth's novel is a gripping read, making real the madness and displacement of war, and showing the bravery of all who suffer, not least, in this case, the children.

Updated: 08:32 Wednesday, March 03, 2004