Nothing predestined Noor Inayat Khan (1914-1944), the frail daughter of a Sufi poet and musician, and a woman of royal lineage, to become an underground radio operator in Paris in 1943, working for the British secret service organized by Churchill to fight the Nazis in occupied countries. Accepting the task almost always meant risking one’s life. Why did Noor agree to do it, and how well did she carry out her mission? Many people worried that she wasn’t up to it: too fragile, too unreliable. But she disproved those fears, even when her network was dismantled, depriving her of her comrades and vastly increasing her responsibilities.

Having been betrayed, she was captured. As a prisoner, she proved herself to be extremely brave, particularly during two escape attempts. This book hews to the historical facts, drawing in part on documents that Noor Inayat Kahn’s biographers were unaware of. Yet it also aims to go further, to describe what documents can’t explain: the inner selves of its protagonists – be they friend or foe – and above all, the inner truth about a naïve, complex young woman who gave up her life both innocently and with full awareness of what she was doing, allowing herself to become a martyr.

A fictionalized biography of a little-known, real-life heroine of World War II whose life was the stuff of Hollywood: Noor Inayat Khan (1914-1944).