Code Name Verity
Elizabeth Wein's 2012 novel opens with one of the most disarming first-person narrators in recent YA, a captured British Special Operations Executive agent in occupied France, writing a forced confession to her Gestapo torturers in exchange for clothes and a few more days of life. Through her smuggled pages we get the friendship between two young women drawn into the war effort, a brilliant Scottish radio operator code-named Verity and her best friend Maddie, a working-class English pilot whose plane went down before the book began. The structure is a slow-detonating puzzle, half the pleasure is realizing what she is and is not telling her captors, and the second half rewrites the first in light of an entirely different speaker. Devastating, intricately constructed, and a definitive answer to anyone who claims YA cannot handle real moral weight.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Code Name Verity
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Captured by the Gestapo in occupied France, a young British spy named only Verity is forced to write a confession in exchange for a few more weeks of life. Her best friend, a pilot named Maddie, was on the same plane.
Code Name Verity was written by Elizabeth Wein and published in 2012. It is YA historical fiction set during World War II, focused on two young British women, a pilot and a spy.
Yes. Elizabeth Wein has written several connected World War II YA novels including Rose Under Fire and The Pearl Thief. Code Name Verity stands on its own and is the most widely read.
Code Name Verity is 348 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Code Name Verity takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
Code Name Verity is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.