The Escape game was an enjoyable WW2 novel which explored the impact of the conflict upon ordinary people. It focuses around a little-known event from the war: that Waddingtons secretly produced Monopoly sets with special equipment inside designed to aid Allied prisoners to escape from German POW camps. They took advantage of a clause in the Geneva Convention which allowed for troops to be sent things like board games in Red Cross packages to get these special Escape Games to them.

I will say that the novel took quite a while to get around to this plotline though: the first part was more about Beryl Clarke, a young woman who has a brother in the RAF who returns home to Leeds to support her mother after her father was killed in a bombing raid. I wouldn’t call this a romance: there is a subplot involving that, but its not really significant until near the end: it is more about the story of Beryl and her family and how she came became involved in what Waddingtons were doing.
James and his American friend/former classmate Kenneth are the other POV characters who spend much of the story in a POW camp. I’m not sure if it was the same one the men from the movie The Great Escape were sent to: but there are definitely shades of that with the tunnels and other escape attempts.

This story was clearly well-researched and bought to mind something I really overlooked for years: that my grandmother was a Wartime Bride (although her husband was not actually in the armed forces) who lived through the Blitz. My only complaints were the Americanisms used by British characters: we don’t usually refer to University as “going to College”. I guess that is inevitable and it is really only a minor nitpick.
The author clearly put a lot of work into researching other aspects of the story without getting bogged down in too much detail.

Thanks to Barbour books for approving to read this title on Netgalley. I was not required to write a positive review and all opinions expressed are my own.