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Following the lives of sisters Emma and Audrey – one engaged to be married, the other in a secret relationship with another woman – as they try to survive the horrors of the four nights of bombing which were the Belfast Blitz, ‘These Days’ is a timeless and heart-breaking novel about living under duress, about family, and about how we try to stay true to ourselves.
Canon Daniel Clement is Rector of Champton. He has been there for eight years, arriving at the invitation of the patron and landowner, Bernard, Baron de Floures, of Champton House. Daniel’s previous post was curate at a smart central London parish, where he got to know the de Floures family through his brother Theo, an up-and-coming actor and socialite. Audrey Clement, his widowed mother, lives with him at the Rectory on the estate. He has two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda. The story begins with Daniel announcing from the pulpit a plan to install a lavatory in church. This is long overdue, he thinks and so does Bernard de Floures, but the announcement goes down badly with the parish. Firm opposition comes from Mrs Harper and Mrs Dollinger of the Flower Guild, who are habitual opposers of change. There is opposition too from others who do not like the the thought of matters lavatorial in church.
Laura, an impoverished Cornish girl, meets her husband when they are both in service in Teignmouth in 1916. They have a baby, Charles, but Laura’s husband returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with the tuberculosis that will soon leave her a widow. In a small, class-obsessed town she raises her boy alone, working as a laundress, and gradually becomes aware that he is some kind of genius. As an intensely private young man, Charles signs up for the navy with the new rank of coder. His escape from the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston to the colour and violence of war sees him blossom as he experiences not only the possibility of death, but the constant danger of a love that is as clandestine as his work.
‘Bad Relations’ tells the story of a family fractured by history, geography and desire. On the battlefields of the Crimea, William Gale cradles the still-warm body of his brother. William’s experience of war is to bring about a change in him that will reverberate through his family over the next two centuries. In the 1970s, William’s English descendants invite Stephen, a distant Australian cousin, to stay in their bohemian house in Cornwall – but their golden summer entanglements will end in a dramatic fall from grace. Half a century later, a confrontation between the surviving members of the family culminates in a terrible reckoning.
April, 1940. Louise Belmont runs, naked, down the boulevard du Montparnasse. To understand the tragic scene she has just experienced, she will have to plunge into the madness of the ‘Phoney War’, when the whole of France, seized by the panic of a new World War, descends into chaos. Alongside bistro-owner Monsieur Jules, new recruit Gabriel and small-time crook Raoul, Louise navigates this period of enormous upheaval and extraordinary twists of fate, for as the Nazi’s advance, the threat of German occupation will uncover long-buried secrets and make strange bedfellows. With his characteristic wit and verve, Pierre Lemaitre chronicles the greatness and decline of a people crushed by circumstance. In ‘Mirror of Our Sorrows’, the final novel in the Paris between-the-wars trilogy, is an incandescent tale that is both burlesque and tragic.
September 1943: German forces occupy Rome. SS officer Paul Hauptmann rules with terror. The war’s outcome is far from certain. An Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty, dedicates himself to helping those escaping from the Nazis. His home is Vatican City, the world’s smallest state, a neutral, independent country within Rome where the occupiers hold no sway. Here Hugh brings together an unlikely band of friends to hide the vulnerable under the noses of the enemy. But Hauptmann’s net begins closing in on the Escape Line and the need for a terrifyingly audacious mission grows critical. By Christmastime, it’s too late to turn back.
Autumn 1945. Off the east coast of England, a Japanese sub surfaces, unloads its mysterious cargo, then blows itself to pieces. Former spy Professor Tom Wilde is enjoying peacetime in Cambridge, settling back into teaching and family life. Until a call from senior MI5 boss Lord Templeman brings him out of retirement. A nearby village has been locked down by the military, its residents blighted by a deadly illness. No one is allowed in or out. There are rumours the Nazi machine is still operational, with links to Unit 731, a notorious Japanese biological warfare research laboratory. But how could they possibly be plotting on British soil – and why? What’s more, Wilde and Templeman’s names are discovered on a Gestapo kill list. And after a series of assassinations an unthinkable question emerges: could an Englishman be behind the plot?
In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For 11-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it’s the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. Mary will go on to live through the Coronation and the World Cup final, royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She’ll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave. As we travel through 75 years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the Internet, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary’s family – and their country – closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before?
June 1944, Romsey, England. Josephine ‘Jo’ Fox is at an impasse since the unwelcome return of her wayward husband Richard. So, when he disappears again, she is neither concerned nor surprised – until a burning car is discovered with a body inside. And there are signs that Richard is somehow involved. Jo is determined to find both her husband and answers, yet with her friend Bram Nash in hospital suffering an infection of his old war wound, she must do so alone. When information comes to light that implicates Bram too, Jo finds herself on a dangerous path to the truth. But what will be left for her when all is revealed?
One of Grossman’s three great war novels, ‘The People Immortal’ is both a work of fiction and an important contribution to the Soviet war effort. Set during the catastrophic defeats of the war’s first months, it tracks a Red Army regiment that wins a minor victory in eastern Belorussia but fails to exploit this success. A battalion is then entrusted with the task of slowing the German advance, and eventually encircled, before ultimately breaking out and joining with the rest of the Soviet forces.
Karl Braun is a slight, grey-haired man who lodges in West London and works as a tuner for a firm of piano makers who know little or nothing about him. His fellow lodgers believe that he, like them, came to England to flee Hitler. But the outwardly poised Herr Braun is inwardly a very anxious man, wracked especially by newspaper reports of the ongoing hunt for Nazi war criminals.
In Second World War Bath, young, naïve wireless engineer Will meets German refugee Elsa Klein; she is sophisticated, witty and worldly, and at last his life seems to make sense – until, soon after, the newly married couple’s home is bombed, and Will awakes from the wreckage to find himself alone. No one has heard of Elsa Klein. They say he was never married. Seventy years later, Laura is a social worker battling her way out of depression and off medication. Her new case is a strange, isolated old man whose house hasn’t changed since the war. A man who insists his wife vanished many, many years before. Everyone thinks he’s suffering dementia. But Laura begins to suspect otherwise.
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