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Rosie Ewing #5
Staying Alive
The prequel to Alexander Fullerton's popular SOE quartet - Rosie's first mission in France . . .
When Rosie Ewing (wartime secret agent) read Alexander Fullerton's four novels based on her adventures in German-occupied France, she wrote to him suggesting that he might like to hear the story of her first mission, when she'd parachuted into moonlit countryside near Cahors and made her way down to Toulouse to join the SOE network as a radio-operator and courier.
Rosie is twenty-four at the time, when the expected life-span of a radio-operator was six weeks. A group, codenamed Countryman, are briefed by London to get a certain German out of Vichy's hands - but what they don't know is that they themselves are being sold out to the Gestapo. Betrayal is the dread every agent lives with every minute of every day, but Rosie has survived to tell her extraordinary tale...
When Rosie Ewing (wartime secret agent) read Alexander Fullerton's four novels based on her adventures in German-occupied France, she wrote to him suggesting that he might like to hear the story of her first mission, when she'd parachuted into moonlit countryside near Cahors and made her way down to Toulouse to join the SOE network as a radio-operator and courier.
Rosie is twenty-four at the time, when the expected life-span of a radio-operator was six weeks. A group, codenamed Countryman, are briefed by London to get a certain German out of Vichy's hands - but what they don't know is that they themselves are being sold out to the Gestapo. Betrayal is the dread every agent lives with every minute of every day, but Rosie has survived to tell her extraordinary tale...
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
16 people are currently reading
31 people want to read
About the author
Alexander Fullerton
65 books30 followersAlexander Fullerton (1924–2008) was a British author of naval and other fiction. Born in 1924 in Suffolk and brought up in France, he was a cadet during the years 1938-1941 at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth from the age of thirteen. He went to sea serving first in the battleship Queen Elizabeth in the Mediterranean, and spent the rest of the war at sea - mostly under it, in submarines.
Fullerton's first novel SURFACE! sold over 500,000 copies. Then he worked on the 9-volume Nicholas Everard series that made his reputation.
Series:
* Nicholas Everard Saga
* Rosie Ewing
Source: Wikipedia
Fullerton's first novel SURFACE! sold over 500,000 copies. Then he worked on the 9-volume Nicholas Everard series that made his reputation.
Series:
* Nicholas Everard Saga
* Rosie Ewing
Source: Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 18, 2018
Listened to audio. Very impressive writing - so gripping that I kept on thinking of the characters and story even when I wasn't reading. The war story was a bit too upsetting for my taste though, so I had to skip bits. Very believable - had to check if it was fiction or non-fiction. Loved the way it moved between present tense - interviewing a war heroine - to the past.
April 10, 2020
"Staying Alive", Alexander Fullerton's fifth Rosie Ewing WWII SOE novel is perhaps the best of all in this thrilling series. The journey for Rosie, for the author/narrator, and for the reader is gripping, challenging, and most satisfying. The narrator, concludes (and begins) the tale of the English-French British SOE "pianist" (radio operator) Rosie with her first, previously untold deployment into Nazi-occupied Europe and her baptism of fire in the South of France. Perhaps Fullerton's best-ever characterizations are realised in the introduction and development of this cast. Dire fore-shadowing gives little away while building anticipation and dramatic tension throughout this relative short-lived collection of underground operations. You ride with Rosie along the long country roads with her transciever tucked into the bicycle's luggage to meet broadcast schedules while evading Abwher seekers. You question the loyalties of friends and strangers during the growing Nazi occupation of this formerly unoccupied section of France. All the while, you do know that Rosie will survive, for she is telling the narrator her back story in the early 21st century. Nevertheless the tension is there and the reader wonders to the very last page what will have happened in 1942 and how the overall saga shall end. Fullerton lets neither the reader nor Rosie down and this book is well worth the read as the journey is indeed its own reward. Highly recommended. (I have read this four times now, having nursed every moment of enjoyment out of the reading thereof. No doubt, I shall read it again.
August 26, 2018
Read them all in order
The last is the best, if you leave it to the last. Each book is riveting for what it describes: the underground in Nazi-occupied France, French nationals, supported with money and arms and volunteers from England. The known risks and courage against the Boche. Most were murdered, before mercifully being tortured and sent to concentration camps. No one survived without scars.
The last is the best, if you leave it to the last. Each book is riveting for what it describes: the underground in Nazi-occupied France, French nationals, supported with money and arms and volunteers from England. The known risks and courage against the Boche. Most were murdered, before mercifully being tortured and sent to concentration camps. No one survived without scars.
October 12, 2025
disappointing and obtuse
Obvious and boring. The "then/now" device did not work well, the over populated cast of characters did not help make sense of the telling as well.
Disappointing and obtuse.
Obvious and boring. The "then/now" device did not work well, the over populated cast of characters did not help make sense of the telling as well.
Disappointing and obtuse.
November 6, 2020
There’s always a risk, when an author writes a book about how his book was written, that the story might get lost in detail that’s fascinating only to the author. So it is with Staying Alive, the story of Rosie Quarry, the real live person behind the Rosie Ewing series of books by British author Alexander Fullerton.
Fullerton is about the same age as my father, which makes him a teenager for most of World War II. There’s very little about him on the web, but Fantastic Fiction‘ tells me that he was ‘a cadet at Dartmouth at the age of thirteen and went to sea serving first in the battleship Queen Elizabeth in the Mediterranean’. His first novel Surface was published in 1953 and became a bestseller, and he went on to establish himself as a prolific author of books with wartime themes.
He started his Rosie Ewing series in 1995, producing four novels about her adventures as a secret agent in France after Paris fell to the Germans in 1940. These were based on research so it must have been a bit of a shock when the real Rosie wrote to him and offered to tell him the story of her first mission. Staying Alive (2006) is Fullerton’s record of how they met and talked over a series of days in Paris, interwoven with the story of that mission.
The trouble is, the story of the mission is really interesting, but the back story is clumsily handled and doesn’t really earn its place in the book until the very end.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2010/02/19/s...
Fullerton is about the same age as my father, which makes him a teenager for most of World War II. There’s very little about him on the web, but Fantastic Fiction‘ tells me that he was ‘a cadet at Dartmouth at the age of thirteen and went to sea serving first in the battleship Queen Elizabeth in the Mediterranean’. His first novel Surface was published in 1953 and became a bestseller, and he went on to establish himself as a prolific author of books with wartime themes.
He started his Rosie Ewing series in 1995, producing four novels about her adventures as a secret agent in France after Paris fell to the Germans in 1940. These were based on research so it must have been a bit of a shock when the real Rosie wrote to him and offered to tell him the story of her first mission. Staying Alive (2006) is Fullerton’s record of how they met and talked over a series of days in Paris, interwoven with the story of that mission.
The trouble is, the story of the mission is really interesting, but the back story is clumsily handled and doesn’t really earn its place in the book until the very end.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2010/02/19/s...
February 14, 2012
I love stories about people caught up in World War 2, and this one did not disappoint. terrific research handled well and dropped into the narrative rather than rammed down one's throat. The French resistance heroine is feisty and believable. Good read.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews