This is a dual time tale beginning in June 1939 Tyneside which Jack Ellison has had to leave quickly and unexpectedly after a fight, he reaches Berkshire and feels lucky to be given work on a farm, but war is in the air and he has decided to join the army as soon as he can. Meanwhile he has fallen for Gwen his employer’s daughter, but she has a complicated love life and isn’t much interested in Jack, but he could be of use to her.

Gwen is the farmer’s daughter and the tale from her point of view begins in May 1945 when everyone is waiting for sons and husbands to be demobbed – the ones that have survived anyway. But Jack has told Gwen that he will never be back even if he does survive the war.

There’s supposed to be a bit of a mystery about Jack’s background but to be honest I found it all to be very predictable, it seemed obvious how things were going to resolve. The book is far too long and has too much in it about the farming methods of the time. I’m all for authors doing research but it doesn’t ALL have to be added to the book.

Also from my own family history I have knowledge of exactly what happened to the soldiers who had taken part in the Dunkirk debacle, and they were kept well away from the D-Day landings, but were deployed to the ‘cleaning up’ operation a couple of weeks later, a form of punishment really as they were seen as tainted by failure and possibly psychologically not fit to have another go at the German army. It was years before it dawned on me that what my father-in-law meant by ‘cleaning up’ was that they had to deal with all the dead bodies that were lying around the countryside. In this book the Dunkirk survivors take part in D-Day though, and that makes me question how correct other facts are, such as the scanty shipbuiding details which I suspect are wrong, it’s another subject I have some knowledge of as the sister of Clydeside shipbuilders and a viewer of historic films on shipbuilding. Yes I might be nit-picking.

Anyway, this is yet another book which would have benefitted with being edited – a lot. However, that’s my thoughts on the matter, others may thoroughly enjoy the long and slow tale. I really couldn’t find much to like in Gwen’s personality, which is always a problem for me. It is I suppose a re-write of Far from the Madding Crowd, including the rural life, but nobody can write rural society as well as Thomas Hardy could. However, if you haven’t read Hardy and you don’t mind a lot of padding then you might enjoy this.

Thank you to NetGalley for sending me a digital copy of the book for review via HQ.