The Pathfinder

Margaret Mayhew was born in London within the sound of Bow Bell and her earliest memories are of the German Blitz on the city. Her father was a pioneer heart surgeon at Guy’s Hospital and her mother was French. She was educated at Malvern Girls’ College and in Lausanne, Switzerland. She began writing short stories and novels in her mid-thirties and a number of her books are set in the Second World War. Margaret Mayhew has penned over a dozen novels since her first publication in 1976. Born in London three years before the beginning of World War II, Mayhew formed vivid childhood memories of the bombing of the English capital by the Germans, and many of her novels deal with the events of that war and its aftermath. Mayhew's books often have romance and friendship at the center of their tales of men and women caught up in the turbulence and violence of wartime. In The Little Ship, for example, Mayhew presents a cast of young characters, English, Austrian, and German, who are friends and rivals before the war, and then in 1940 are tossed together again as the small boat they once sailed now becomes a lifeboat rescuing soldiers from Dunkirk. Reviewing this British import in Booklist, Patty Engelmann noted that "Mayhew's gem of a book tells about childhood attachments and the upheaval of war."