ON SALE DECEMBER 1, 2026: Bestselling and award-winning author Jennifer Donnelly continues her Rose Petals series — new stories set within her beloved Tea Rose saga — with A Company of Shadows. 

The Story

France, 1918. Private Charlie Bristow — the son of Joe and Fiona Bristow — is sent alone through enemy-held territory on an impossible mission across occupied France. His only contact on the other side is a French agent who is nothing like the person he expected to find.

The two mount an audacious deception against a German colonel whose battle plans put thousands of lives in peril. In the process, Charlie finds something he never looked for — but the war will not let him keep.

A Company of Shadows is about the courage of ordinary people in impossible circumstances, the love that war gives with one hand and destroys with the other, and what it costs to carry the dead. For readers of the Tea Rose saga, it is also the story of what happened to Charlie Bristow — and why Fiona’s struggle to save her son is the hardest battle she has ever fought.

Inspiration

When I was a kid in Port Leyden, New York, a man lived in the village with his mother.

He never smiled. Every day he walked the railroad line to Boonville and back — seven miles south, seven miles home, the same stretch of track.

I didn’t understand this. Couldn’t he drive to Boonville in his car like everyone else? I asked my grandmother why he walked so much. She told me he’d been in the war, and that he’d come home with shell shock.

That was the first time I ever heard that phrase, and I didn’t know what it meant. My grandmother explained: his mind had been damaged by the war. By what he’d seen, by what he’d experienced. The walking was how he lived with it.

The man’s story stayed with me. Years later, I came across footage of World War One veterans in British hospitals where shell-shocked men were sent. In them, I saw the living testimony to what war can do to a human body. The uncontrolled shaking. The inability to walk a straight line. I remember one man’s eyes, wide open, fearful, fixed on something only he could see.

In 1918 the condition wasn’t well understood – not the mental damage the horrors of trench warfare inflicted on the soul, not the physical damage the percussive force of an exploding shell unleashed on the brain. We had one name for it when I was young, and we have a different one now. But the man walking the tracks in Port Leyden and the men in those films were the same – the war ended, but it left them with a whole new enemy.

I never knew the man’s name. I don’t know if there’s anyone left who could tell me.

Two years ago, my husband, Doug, asked me what had become of Charlie Bristow — Joe and Fiona’s son, seventeen years old and in France in 1918 — and the question landed on top of a memory I’d carried for a long time. Charlie beckoned to me before Doug even finished asking.

The book is dedicated to the man in Port Leyden, and to all veterans, past and present, who have left the battlefield, only to find that it never left them.