by Joyce Dennys (1986)
The sequel to *Henrietta's War*, in the form of letters from doctor's wife Henrietta to her soldier cousin. Henrietta and her neighbors in their quiet village cope with shortages, air raids, sons and brothers in harm's way, and a war that shows no sign of ending. Candid, gently funny, with moments of deep pathos.
Mick Jackson
A cockney evacuee to rural Devon is victimized by a local gang called the Five Boys. But he is not the only stranger to have an impact on the village. There are US soldiers destined for Operation Tiger, an English deserter in hiding, and Bee King.
Valerie Anand
The tumultuous years leading to the reign of Richard III and, on his death, the ascension to the English throne of the first Tudor Henry are conveyed with authoritative detail in this engrossing historical novel. Edward IV is shakily enthroned and England is torn in the York-Lancaster civil strife, when, at age 14, Petronel is unable to produce the male heir which would be her only value to Lionel, who will follow his king to Bosworth field.
Pip Vaughan-Hughes
"It's England, 1235, and Brother Petroc is living a simple life as a novice monk. Struggling to keep his soul fairly clean and worrying most about resisting the local girls, he is helpless when he stumbles headlong into a vicious trap. Framed by a sinister Templar Knight for the brutal murder of a church official and accused of the theft of a priceless relic, he is forced to run for his life. But when his best friend, Will, is killed by the chasing knight - Petroc's flight becomes a quest for restitution." "Trusting his fate to an enigmatic relic-hunter and scoundrel, he must dodge the long arm of the church and somehow get to the bottom of everything that has happened to him. He must find out how his fate is entwined with that of the sacred object and get revenge on the man who wrecked his life - all the while avoiding the pitfalls and perils of love for a beautiful Greek princess."--Back cover.
Harold Orel
While Englishmen were dying by the thousands on the battlefields of Europe, their friends and relations on the home front were reading books of humor, tales of espionage and adventure, colorful romances, and historical swashbucklers. Harold Orel's penetrating book explains why escapist fiction dominated the popular literary market in England throughout the Great War. A large factor, he shows, was the view of publishers, reviewers, booksellers, libraries, literary groups, and the general reading public that escapist fiction was a useful diversion from the inescapable horrors of war. Orel begins with a survey of the British literary world and its attitudes toward the novel at the outbreak of the war. Within a broad social, cultural, and economic context he depicts the "fiction industry" at a time of extraordinary upheaval, before the triumph of Modernism, when the attitudes and esthetics of writers, the tastes of readers, and the economics of the marketplace were undergoing rapid transformation. Subsequent chapters offer detailed studies of fifteen of the most touted novels of the period and the ways they reflected--or, more often, failed to reflect--the radical changes taking place as they were being written. The writers examined include George Moore, Norman Douglas, Frank Swinnerton, Compton Mackenzie, Mary Webb, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, John Buchan, Alec Waugh, H.G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett. Many of their novels during these years avoid mention of the war that was reshaping their world, or allude to it only obliquely. The book concludes with a review of changes in the publishing world in 1918, the last year of the Great War. In its comprehensive coverage of a wide range of once popular but now neglected novels, Orel's authoritative study fills a gap in the cultural and literary history of early twentieth-century England.