Welcome, to Mr Ripley’s Enchanted Books. We’re delighted to celebrate the launch of GOLD by Sue Klauber, the second book in a captivating series about a Jewish family’s extraordinary experiences during World War 2. The book will be published on the 12th November 2026 by Troika Books. We hope you enjoy the insight into the storylines. Please check out all the other stops on the book tour. The list of websites and dates can be found below this post. Enjoy and see you SOON!
I don’t know where I first read about the Trent Park secret listeners, but it immediately tickled my imagination and I went looking for a museum there several years before there was one. It was a rainy Sunday afternoon and I could not believe it didn’t exist! Then I read all the books I could find on it by historians and authors but there aren’t many of them as it is a recently discovered intelligence-gathering operation. I am proud to say that I have written the first book for children or teens about it.
The next step was to find the primary sources at the National Archives at Kew in West London. That’s where all the original transcripts of overheard conversations are kept and there are thousands and thousands of them! I saw the photographs and dossiers of the Nazi generals who were kept captive there, which was chilling and made them even more real. I took photographs of the documents and made copious notes and that started the process of working out a narrative path for my dad, the person who the character of John is based on. In Gold he desperately wants to find out what is happening to Jewish people in occupied Europe, as his sister, Eva was trapped in Hungary in enormous danger both from the Nazis and the Hungarian fascists called the Arrow Cross. The secret listeners at Trent Park were told to mark the overheard conversations about the Holocaust with an ‘A’ for ‘Atrocities’.
In the second plot, the siblings John, George and Eva encounter Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s when they are teenagers, so that required research as well. I wanted to show that fascism can take hold in any country, not just far away ones and we always have to be on the lookout for prejudice, racism, and antisemitism.
Researching Hungary in WW2 was also an enormous piece of work as I wanted to get George and Eva’s experiences as historically accurate as possible.
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