Welcome to Sixty Blades of Grass!

I am Elizabeth Millane, the writer of Sixty Blades of Grass. If you are reading this, you are curious about the book.

It was a long time in the making. It started when I overheard my Aunts, talking with pride about our relatives deeds and danger during the Second World War, their exploits in the Dutch Underground.

It was imbedded in my heart and memory when my Uncle, seeing my brother perched on the stairway, watching him groom himself in front of our full length mirror in the front hall, decided to play a trick on us. He transformed himself into a Nazi by clicking his heels together and thrusting his arm out, crying, “Heil HItler!” We ran screaming away, frightened by this specter of our genteel Uncle, changed into evil. He laughed then, smoothed back his hair, and sauntered away.

This memory, the stories I was told later, all percolated in my head until one day, when I wrote down what I had learned when I visited my Aunts and Uncles in The Netherlands, and gave it to my brothers and sisters. That wasn’t enough, It kept nudging me, clear that it remained a story to be told. Then, during a writers party, an agent speaking from a podium, the last chapter came to me and I left, as if in a trance, returned home and wrote it out, the last chapter written first.

Then came the years of revising it, struggling to find the right query that would appeal to the right agent, publishing house.

Thanks to a friend, I found an agent who was inspired by the story. He never gave up on it.

Thank you for being here with me.