But for these three women, their friends are their family because they can’t tell anyone outside Bletchley Park about the top-secret war work they do. Even without the reductive stereotype that women can’t be friends without catfights, women are expected to put family ties before friends. Q: What makes writing about broken friendships intriguing?Ī: Friendship between women can be a complicated thing. And Beth is the shy village wallflower whose skill at crossword puzzles and patterns makes her a brilliant cryptanalyst, turning encrypted code traffic into readable military communications.

Osla is a beautiful, vivacious ex-debutante whose finishing school German is put to use translating decoded intelligence from German to English. Mab is an ambitious, sharp-witted East Ender recruited from a secretarial pool to operate and maintain the famous decoding machines.

The best and brightest minds in England - many of them women - were sent to work there in secrecy to break the supposedly unbreakable Axis military codes, and they succeeded brilliantly.Ī: I love all three of my heroines! They’re all based closely on real women or composites of real women, and they represent the range of roles women could play in the Bletchley Park codebreaking process. A: Bletchley Park is the isolated English country house that, during World War II, became the intelligence hub of Great Britain.

The rose code book