Everyone Brave is Forgiven / Chris Cleave

Mary is a very upper-crusty native of London. When Britain and France declare war against Germany in 1939, she immediately shushes off the ski slopes of her posh finishing school in Switzerland, gets on a train back to England, and signs up for volunteer war service. She fancies herself in the role of a wartime spy, but instead is put in charge of a class of school children to fill in for male teachers called to active duty. This lasts for only a few days at which point the children are evacuated to the countryside and she is let go because she identifies a little too closely with her young pupils. In particular, she bonds with an American boy whose father is employed by a minstrel show at the London Lyceum, and this bond lasts throughout the novel.

Mary first views the war as an adventure, but is nearly done in by it. Her large family home in Pimlico survives seemingly untouched with its servants and staid butler, almost preserved like a relic from a vanished world. At the same time bombs almost continuously rain down on working class East London in what seems like a classist plot by the German bombers. There is a wonderful and unlikely long-distance romance that develops and survives the cruel twists that the war presents, joining two strands of the narrative.

UK cover

This novel is full of great prose, wonderful dialogue, exquisite historical detail, and particularly great insight into the London blitz and the siege of Malta, the latter about which I knew very little. There are just so many wonderful “bits” that will stay with you long after you put the book down.

Readalikes: A God in Ruins, All the Light We Cannot See

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

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