Tag Archives: WW1

#BookReview ‘Precipice’ by @Robert_Harris #WW1 #thriller

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A gripping, page-by-page account of the prelude to war interleaved with the secret letters and snatched meetings of a forbidden relationship between the prime minister and a young society woman. I read Precipice by Robert Harris over a weekend, resenting anything that forced me to set the book aside. Robert HarrisThat the man involved is Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, that the story starts in the days preceding the declaration of war against Germany, that the fictional account is based on truth, all adds to the frisson. Harris is a master storyteller used to creating a fictional thriller based on historical fact. It ceased to matter what was true and what was made up, Harris puts us inside the private worlds of Asquith and Lady Venetia Stanley at a time of national danger. We all know how the war begins and ends but I didn’t know the details of the Asquith/Stanley affair or the level of reckless sharing by Asquith of privileged information; using ordinary post, top secret telegrams thrown from car windows. ‘That was a kind of madness.’ Letters were written, sent, received and replied to, with such speed and in such volume as to resemble a frantic exchange of emails or texts between lovers today.
Harris’s genius is to add the fictional character of young policeman Detective Sergeant Paul Deemer, a new recruit at Special Branch, who is charged with looking into the torn remnants of secret Government documents found in the road and handed in by a member of the public. Deemer adds the element of risk that the story needs, a sense of danger as the sergeant uses old-fashioned policing technique – asking questions, following leads, covert surveillance, gathering evidence – in the chase to uncover the truth. Meanwhile, uncannily accurate comments about military matters are appearing in the Daily Mail. From where is the newspaper getting its information? Is the Prime Minister blinded by love? Is he incompetent, perhaps a traitor? Or is someone close to him a spy?
This is a political story about war, about ambition, obsession, showing government tensions at the most pressurised time possible as the country faces tremendous change. I turned to Harris after an unsatisfactory attempt to read another novel, it was like gulping water at a time of extreme thirst.

Read my reviews of these other thrillers, also by Robert Harris:-
AN OFFICER AND A SPY
MUNICH
V2

If you like this, try:-
‘Life Class’ by Pat Barker #LIFECLASS1
‘The Warm Hands of Ghosts’ by Katherine Arden
‘The Lie’ by Helen Dunmore

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview PRECIPICE by @Robert_Harris https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-8ub via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Michelle Paver

#BookReview ‘The Warm Hands of Ghosts’ by @arden_katherine #WW1 #mystery

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The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden is a historical fantasy about a Great War nurse who returns to the Flanders battlefield to find her brother, believed dead. Part-history, part-ghost story, part-magical realism, part-mystery, there are times when I didn’t know what to believe. Katherine ArdenHaving already served as a nurse in the trenches, Canadian Laura Iven is back at home in Halifax, recovering from the injuries she sustained while nursing. But she isn’t there for long. After the shocking death of her parents in an explosion in Halifax, Laura receives a package from Belgium; her brother Freddie’s uniform and dog tags. The assumption is that he is dead. But Laura receives no official confirmation that he is dead or missing. Disturbed by supernatural possibilities and questions raised at a séance, she decides to return to Belgium to find Freddie.
Laura and Freddie’s stories are told in alternating sections in a timeline that jumped around in a disorientating way; which made me identify with the dislocation and giddiness of Laura’s circumstances. Freddie Iven awakes in No Man’s Land after an explosion and finds himself trapped in mud beneath an overturned pillbox. His only companion is an injured German soldier. Should he kill his enemy. Or can they help each other. If they escape, where should they go. Escaping into the hellish landscape of mud and putrefaction they stay together and wander, lost both emotionally and geographically. Until they meet a fiddler, a man who entertains, who makes the horror of war disappear for a brief time. Is he real, and what is his unspoken motivation? Exhausted, their decision-making puts them in danger. Freddie risks being shot as a deserter, Winter as an enemy.
Laura, now volunteering at a private hospital behind the lines, learns to ride a motorcycle so she can search for Freddie or anyone who remembers him. Troubled by her own trauma, Laura’s nightmares become more vivid. She hears talk of ghosts that move about among living people, and a hotelier who offers soldiers the chance to forget their terrors. Seen once, this man and his hotel can never be found again. Is he real, or another ghost. Laura is a likeable heroine. At times dogged in her determination, unattractively so for the times, and sometimes tin-eared, I was willing her on in her search for Freddie. As the traumas of present-day and past war experiences combine, the ability to differentiate between real life, facts, dreams and superstitions becomes transient.
This is an unusual take on the familiar World War One themes. Powerful, harrowing, it examines the nature of what it takes to fight in a war and kill another human being, when the enemy soldier is really an ordinary man like yourself. Thought-provoking.

Read my reviews of the Winternight trilogy, also by Katherine Arden:-
THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE #1WINTERNIGHT
THE GIRL IN THE TOWER #2WINTERNIGHT
THE WINTER OF THE WITCH #3WINTERNIGHT

If you like this, try:-
‘Another World’ by Pat Barker
‘A Long Long Way’ by Sebastian Barry
‘The Lie’ by Helen Dunmore

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS @arden_katherine https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-7Xy via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- SJ Parris

#BookReview ‘You’ll Never See Me Again’ @LesleyPearse #WW1 #romance

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When a character in a film says ‘never’ it’s a sign that the impossible thing will definitely happen before the end. Such is the title of the new novel from Lesley Pearse,You’ll Never See Me Again. Lesley PearseIt is 1917 and a storm is thrashing the Devon coast at Hallsands. Betty Wellows is with her shell-shocked husband Martin at his mother’s home, safely up the cliffs. Martin no longer recognises Betty, he is a different man from the fisherman who went to war. Betty is working all hours to support her husband and his mother, putting up with insults, petty grievances, grief for the loss of her husband. As the storm becomes wild and dangerous, Agnes instructs her daughter-in-law to go to her own house beside the beach to rescue her belongings from the flood. Afraid, Betty escapes the older woman’s abuse and runs into the storm. As the waves crash into her home, Betty realises this is her chance to escape Hallsands, Agnes and Martin.
The dramatic opening grabbed my attention and my emotions. Betty is trapped in a life of poverty with a husband who no longer recognises her and a mother-in-law who takes her money and treats her like a skivvy. When she has the chance to escape, Betty takes it. I spent the whole novel chewing over Betty’s dilemma; was she right to run, should she have stayed. Pearse maintains this dilemma throughout the book as Betty goes to Bristol where she changes her name to Mrs Mabel Brook, a widow. You’ll Never See Me Again is the story of how a lone woman in the middle of the Great War is able to strive to improve her lot in life. Mabel suffers setbacks, encounters thieves and frauds, and sheds copious tears. There are moments where her life seems to have reached a settled, easier place; but, of course, more trauma lies ahead.
This is a cleverly plotted book that kept me guessing to the end. Mabel at times is her own worst enemy, and she finds it difficult to accept help. Then she accidentally discovers a talent she never knew she had. When she moves to Dorchester, Dorset, to be a live-in servant/housekeeper for illustrator Miss Clara May, Mabel’s life takes a new turn. Nearby is a prisoner of war camp and one of the inmates, Carsten, looks after Clara’s garden. Carsten and Mabel fall into a state of mutual liking when Spanish flu strikes at the camp; afraid for Carsten’s health, Mabel volunteers as a nurse.
Mabel ran away from Hallsands to be free, but her past travels with her. Finally she must confront her origins in order to move on with her life. Mabel has a strong sense of honesty and justice, which sounds odd given the way she ran away in chapter one. But she is unselfish, never turning away from difficult decisions and transforming herself in a short space of time into a beautiful, assured woman that her neighbours at Hallsands would not recognise.

Here’s my review of THE HOUSE ACROSS THE STREET, also by Lesley Pearse.

If you like this, try:-
‘One Step Too Far’ by Tina Seskis
‘Sometimes I Lie’ by Alice Feeney
‘The Girls’ by Lisa Jewell

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview YOU’LL NEVER SEE ME AGAIN by @LesleyPearse https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3ZO via @Sandra Danby

#BookReview ‘Wake’ by Anna Hope #historical #WW1

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Amongst the profusion of novels about the centenary of the Great War, Wake by Anna Hope stood out for me from the rest because it is about the aftermath rather than the fighting. The spine of the narrative is the journey of the body to be entombed in Westminster Abbey as the ‘Unknown Soldier.’ Anna HopeI have visited the tomb but had not considered its selection, the post-war politics and social consequences of choosing one soldier’s remains rather than another. Anna Hope handles a delicate topic – isn’t everything to do with war emotionally-delicate? – with confidence. Wake is a powerful novel by a debut author.
There is something unsettling about the first scenes where un-named soldiers drive out into what was no-man’s-land, not knowing where they are going or why. They are directed to dig up the remains of a soldier: unidentified soldiers dig up the remains of an unidentified victim. Four bodies are laid out, not so much bodies as heaps of remains. A Brigadier-General closes his eyes and rests his hand on one of the stretchers, this body is put into a thin wooden coffin. The three not chosen are put into a shell hole at the side of the road, a chaplain says a short prayer, and then re-buried. The chosen one is taken to London.
Three storylines run parallel to this central spine. Hettie and Di are dancers at the Hammersmith Palais. Charging 6d for a dance, Hettie is skilled at spotting the injured soldiers who are disguising the lack of a limb, she is skilled at matching the rhythm of her dancing to theirs. Dancing is the bright spot in her life; her home is under the shadow of her father’s death and her brother’s shell shock.
Evelyn works in a Government department, her job is grey, her surroundings are grey. She is no longer close to her brother who returned from the war seemingly uninjured but is emotionally removed from life. Every day she deals with former soldiers, struggling to make a new life, and each soldier she sees reminds her of her lover who died in the war. She wants to move on from the war but feels that she, like everyone else, is trapped in a cycle of grief, disability, guilt and memory.
Ada is still grieving for her son, a grief which puts distance between her and her husband. Her solace is her neighbour Ivy, also grieving. Then one day an ex-soldier knocks on the door, wanting to sell her dishcloths, and something happens which sends her to a medium.
All are drawn to the streets of London on November 11th, 1920, looking for catharsis.

Read my review of THE BALLROOM, also by Anna Hope.

If you like this, try:-
‘Life Class’ by Pat Barker
‘A Long Long Way’ by Sebastian Barry
‘The Lie’ by Helen Dunmore

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview WAKE by Anna Hope via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-LK

#BookReview ‘The Lie’ by Helen Dunmore #WW1 #historical

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I found this to be an unbelievably poignant novel. In The Lie by Helen Dunmore, Daniel Branwell has returned home to Cornwall from The Great War. The stories of his childhood, his war, and his return are interwoven seamlessly. It is also the story of all the lost men who returned from fighting in 1918 and didn’t know where to go or what to do. They faced their futures alone, unsure if they were mad, if their memories of war were correct or whether they were strong enough to resist the memories of carnage. Dan’s life unfolds like a thriller, with mysteries and suspicions, so that I turned the pages looking for answers and before I knew it I had reached the end. Helen DunmoreDunmore is an accomplished novelist and poet who handles her emotionally explosive subject with sure hands, juxtaposing the daily reality of post-war Cornwall with Dan’s memories, perhaps true, perhaps confused, of battle. Truth is the unknown. The war is in every move Dan makes, every thought, every dream. Needing food, he digs the earth to plant vegetables but cannot escape the battlefield: “It was the smell of earth. Not clean earth, turned up by spade or the fork, to be sunned and watered. This earth had nothing to do with growth. It was raw and slimy, blown apart in great clods, churned to greasy, liquid mud that sucked down men or horses. It was earth that should have stayed deep and hidden, but was exposed in all its filth, corrosive, eating away at the bodies that had to live in it. It breathed into me from its wet mouth.”
Soil is an important presence throughout the book. Dan is a gardener, a skill he soon finds on joining the army will not exempt him from fighting as it does the blacksmiths, chefs and mechanics. “Skilled men had their hands full, and weren’t likely to find themselves in the fire-trench. But there wasn’t any call for a gardener. You’d be marched through a village which had been knocked to bits by shelling, and all there’d be left of a hundred gardens was a bit of green straggling out of a gash in a wall.” Instead, Dan digs. Fields don’t look the same as the fields in Cornwall. “Once you got near the line, there wasn’t much you could recognise as a field, any more than the woods were woods. It was all a jumble.”
His childhood in Cornwall with his best friend Frederick, and Frederick’s sister Felicia, resonates throughout the book. Their differences – poor boy and rich boy, the squaddie and the officer – are at the centre of the book. Dan visits their large house with its library full of shiny red-leather bound volumes, smuggling out one book at a time up his jumper. He reads and memorizes: “I hoarded new words and brought them out like coins.” Frederick, who is sent to private school, has no mind for books and envies Dan’s photographic memory. But when war comes, Frederick is sent to officer school and Dan to basic camp.
In Belgium, before the night-time trench raid which changes their lives, Frederick asks Dan to recite a poem. The prospects of the two men are so fragile that the juxtaposition of war and the poem by Matthew Arnold cannot help but be moving:
“And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
When Dan returns to Cornwall he has nowhere to go. As he struggles to survive, shunning company, preferring solitude, he meets Felicia again. The memories come flooding back and he struggles to repel them.

Read my reviews of two other novels by Helen Dunmore:-
BIRDCAGE WALK
EXPOSURE

If you like this, try:-
‘Wake’ by Anna Hope
‘A Long Long Way’ by Sebastian Barry
‘The Bone Church’ by Victoria Dougherty

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE LIE by Helen Dunmore http://wp.me/p5gEM4-Lw via @SandraDanby