This poignant saga navigates the intricate web of love and personal sacrifice characters endure during tumultuous wartime. It excels in its profound psychological insight into the human heart and an unwavering ethos of perseverance against adversity. The narrative weaves a compelling story of love, loss, and the indomitable spirit, immersing readers in an authentic historical setting.
Set on the Western Front, in London and in Paris, My Dear, I Wanted To Tell You is a novel of love, class and sex in wartime, and how war affects those left behind as well as those who fight.
LONDON, APRIL 1919. THE GREAT WAR HAS ENDED. In a flurry of spring blossom, childhood sweethearts Nadine Waverney and Rilery Purefoy are married. Thos who have survived the war are, in a way, home. But Riley is wounded and disfigured; normality seems incomprehensible, and love unfathomable. Honeymooning in a battered, liberated Europe, they long for a marriage made of love and passion rather than dependence and pity. At Locke Hill in Kent, Riley’s former CO Major Peter Locke is obsessed by Homer. His hysterical wife, Julia, and the young son they barely know attempt to navigate family life, but are confounded by the ghosts and memories of Peter’s war. Despite all this, there is the glimmer of a real future in the distance: Rose Locke, Peter’s cousin and Riley’s former nurse, finds that independence might be hers for the taking, after all. For those who fought, those who healed and those who stayed behind, 1919 is a year of accepting realities, holding to hope and reaching after new beginnings. The Heroes’ Welcome is a brave and brilliant evocation of a time deeply wounded by the pain of war. It is as devastating as it is inspiring.
From the bestselling author of My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You and The Heroes' Welcome, Louisa Young's Devotion is a novel of family, love, race and politics set during the electric change of the 1930s. Tom loves Nenna. Nenna loves her father. Her father loves Mussolini. Ideals and convictions are not always so clear in the murky years between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second. For Tom and Kitty Locke, children of the damaged WW1 generation, visiting their cousin Nenna in Rome is a pure joy. For their adoptive parents Nadine and Riley, though, the ground is still shifting underfoot. Nobody knew in 1919 that the children they were bearing would be just ripe for the next war in 1939; nobody knew, in 1935, the implications of an Italian Jewish family supporting Mussolini. Meanwhile Peter Locke and Mabel Zachary have found each other again together in London, itself a city reborn but riddled with its own intolerances. As the heat rises across Europe, voices grow louder and everyone must brace once more to decide what should bring them together, and what must drive them apart.