Wartime recollections: Uncovering silver linings In Maine author’s newest book

Sometimes writers spend years looking for their next book, and sometimes it finds them. Gay M. Grant, Maine author and congressional representative, spent years gardening, baking and sipping tea next to her British “mother-daughter-sister-friend,” Patricia Philips, before she realized that her second book, Destination Unknown, released in 2014, would be about Pat.

It wasn’t until one fateful night in 1996 after Pat’s traumatic response to the sound of a bomb siren on a televised report about the Gulf War that Grant started to unfold the story of Pat’s childhood, a story Pat had never previously uttered. Nearly two decades later, Pat’s account of evacuating her city of Portsmouth for the British countryside during World War Two is published: a touching narrative of perseverance, acceptance, growth, and friendship.