On Hist Fic Saturday
Let's go back in time to ... Flanders, 1919
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| Pan Macmillan January 25th My thanks to the publishers for the copy of the book |
It was understandable that once the First World War was over grieving relatives would want to visit the towns and villages of Flanders to see the places where the lives of their loved ones had ended so violently. Within a few short months of the Armistice in 1918 travel operators, like Thomas Cook, were organising tours to the battlefields, which although a comfort for some, were also seen by others to be in poor taste and disrespectful to the war dead.
In July, 1919 Ruby, Alice and Martha have their own reasons for visiting the small Flemish village of Hoppestadt. Each of them have lost someone important to them and whilst their backgrounds are very different, their shared loss binds them together in ways they could never have imagined. The women find out, to their cost, that searching for loved ones is fraught with worry and whilst they each have a different story to share, it is the rawness of their grief and their need to understand what happened which eventually unites them.
The repercussions of The First World War are still profoundly real in 1919 and this story highlights the struggle of those small communities who were trying so desperately to bring some semblance of order to areas which had been devastated by war. The descriptions of the remnants of the battlefields and trenches and the huge expanse of grave markers particularly at the Tyne Cot cemetery are so vividly described that I felt like I was seeing them at first hand.
Impeccably researched and beautifully written In Love and War is a gentle story with a powerful message. Its quiet realism doesn’t seek to sensationalise what happened during the momentous years of WW1 but rather focuses on the emotional impact of loss and of the eventual hope of reconciliation.
Twitter @LizTrenow #InLoveAndWar
Thanks so much for a lovely review.
ReplyDeleteIt was a pleasure to read such a lovely story.
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