Tag: WW1

#BookReview Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray @vintagebooks

whatcathyreadnext

Two Storm WoodAbout the Book

1919. On the desolate battlefields of northern France, the guns of the Great War are silent. Special battalions now face the dangerous task of gathering up the dead for mass burial.

Captain Mackenzie, a survivor of the war, cannot yet bring himself to go home. First he must see that his fallen comrades are recovered and laid to rest. His task is upended when a gruesome discovery is made beneath the ruins of a German strongpoint.

Amy Vanneck’s fiance is one soldier lost amongst many, but she cannot accept that his body may never be found. She heads to France, determined to discover what became of the man she loved.

It soon becomes clear that what Mackenzie has uncovered is a war crime of inhuman savagery. As the dark truth leaches out, both he and Amy are drawn into the hunt for a psychopath, one for whom the atrocity at Two Storm Wood is not an end, but a beginning.

Format: Hardcover (368 pages)         Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication date: 13th January 2022 Genre: Category: Historical Fiction, Mystery

Find Two Storm Wood on Goodreads

Pre-order/purchase links
Bookshop.org
Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Hive | Amazon UK
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

Two Storm Wood is billed as a historical thriller and whilst there is certainly a thriller element to it, it wasn’t the most compelling aspect of the book for me. In fact, I guessed a key part of the plot pretty early on thanks to some detail in the prologue.

For me, the key strength of the book was how it revealed the ‘debris’ of war, whether that’s material debris, such as abandoned military equipment or bombed out buildings, human debris such as the bodies (or remains of bodies) of fallen soldiers like those Captain Mackenzie’s battalion is tasked with recovering and identifying, or physical debris in the form of the damaged and scarred bodies of those who survived but were terribly injured.

And then there’s the psychological debris: the survivors traumatised by what they witnessed and what they were forced to do. If you’ve never considered just what close combat, such as carrying out a silent raid on an enemy trench, involves in reality, Two Storm Wood will leave you under no illusions. ‘An enemy who chose the bayonet, the knife or the club was an enemy who had lost touch with self-interest, the calculating instinct for self-preservation, an enemy devoted to the collective cause, unafraid to die.’ As the book reveals, often only drugs could provide the necessary impulse to carry out orders, to blank out the dreadful memories or to provide the strength to endure days spent in endless watchfulness.

Amy Vanneck encapsulates the grief of those whose siblings, spouses or loved ones never came back or whose fate remained unknown.  Perhaps unusally given the times, she travels alone to the heart of the now abandoned battlefields searching for the truth about how her fiancé Edward Haslam died, or if indeed he did.  As she edges closer to the truth, it becomes increasingly clear that ‘War is a contest of violence, not virtue’ and the cruelty of what one human being can do to another knows no bounds.

With its vivid battle scenes, Two Storm Wood conjured up pictures in my mind that I’m not sure I want to recall in a hurry. The book powerfully, and at times graphically, illustrates that ‘War poisons everything that it does not destroy’. It also features one of the most evil and ruthless fictional characters I’ve come across in a long time, a key ingredient for a really absorbing thriller.

I received an advance review copy of Vintage via NetGalley.

In three words: Chilling, dark, immersive

Try something similar: The Glorious Dead by Tim Atkinson

Follow this blog via Bloglovin

Philip GrayAbout the Author

Philip Gray was inspired to write Two Storm Wood by his grandfather who fought in the First World War. (Photo credit: Author website)

Connect with Philip
Website | Twitter

#BookReview The Redeemed by Tim Pears

whatcathyreadnext

The RedeemedAbout the Book

It is 1916. The world has gone to war, and young Leo Sercombe, hauling coal aboard the HMS Queen Mary, is a long way from home. The wild, unchanging West Country roads of his boyhood seem very far away from life aboard a battle cruiser, a universe of well-oiled steel, of smoke and spray and sweat, where death seems never more than a heartbeat away.

Skimming through those West Country roads on her motorcycle, Lottie Prideaux defies the expectations of her class and sex as she covertly studies to be a vet. But the steady rhythms of Lottie’s practice, her comings and goings between her neighbours and their animals, will be blown apart by a violent act of betrayal, and a devastating loss.

In a world torn asunder by war, everything dances in flux: how can the old ways life survive, and how can the future be imagined, in the face of such unimaginable change? How can Leo, lost and wandering in the strange and brave new world, ever hope to find his way home?

Format: Paperback (400 pages)    Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication date: 13th June 2019 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find The Redeemed on Goodreads

Purchase links
Bookshop.org
Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Hive | Amazon UK
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

Shortlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2020, The Redeemed is the final book in Tim Pears’s West Country trilogy. The first two books in the trilogy – The Horseman and The Wanderers – made the longlists for The Walter Scott Prize in 2018 and 2019 respectively.  The Redeemed continues the stories of Leo Sercombe and Lottie Prideaux from the previous two books; the events in their lives being told in parallel and only converging at the end of the book.

Part one of the book recounts Leo’s experiences serving in the Navy aboard a coal-powered battle cruiser, during which he witnesses the Battle of Jutland and its deadly aftermath. Meanwhile Lottie, much to the dismay of her father’s new wife, has become assistant to the local vet, learning how to treat sick farm and domestic animals. It’s a changing world in which conscription has robbed estates, like those owned by Lottie’s father, of farm workers but there is also the possibility of new opportunities for women. Lottie’s ambition is to study veterinary science but all that is put at risk by a violent act from a quite unexpected quarter.

In the mistaken belief that his future lies elsewhere, part three of the book sees Leo, now a qualified diver, employed in a bold scheme to raise the battleships scuttled by the German navy in Scapa Flow at the end of the war. Leo undertakes this dangerous work to pursue his dream of earning enough money to purchase a piece of land where he can return to his first love, working with horses. Despite everything, he keeps alive the hope that he will be able to fulfil a promise made long ago.

Each part of the book contains an immense amount of detail: about daily life aboard a battleship, the care of horses and cattle, or the steps needed to float a submerged ship. Flowing throughout the book, however, is a deep sense of the natural world.  Eventually, the stories of Leo and Lottie converge and what follows is touching and intensely moving both for its intensity and its transcience.

The Redeemed is like a long train journey where, whilst you’re keen to reach your destination, there’s also immense joy to be found in watching the beautiful scenery go by.

In three words: Lyrical, moving, immersive

Try something similar: The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason

Time Pears authorAbout the Author

Born in 1956, Tim Pears grew up in Devon and left school at sixteen. He worked in a wide variety of unskilled jobs: trainee welder, assistant librarian, trainee reporter, archaeological worker, fruit picker, nursing assistant in a psychiatric ward, groundsman in a hotel & caravan park, fencer, driver, sorter of mail, builder, painter & decorator, night porter, community video maker and art gallery manager in Devon, Wales, France, Norfolk and Oxford.

Always he was writing, and in time making short films. He took the Directing course at the National Film and Television School, graduating in the same month that his first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, was published, in 1993. In the Place of Fallen Leaves was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award.

Tim’s second novel, In a Land of Plenty, was made into a ten-part drama series for the BBC broadcast in 2001. Other novels include  A Revolution of the Sun, Wake Up, Blenheim Orchard, Landed and Disputed Land. Landed was given the MJA Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

In the Light of Morning was a departure, set in Yugoslavia in the Second World War. Tim then embarked on his most ambitious work, a trilogy of novels (The Horseman, The Wanderers and The Redeemed) set before, during and in the aftermath of the First World War.

Tim is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. (Bio credit: Author website/Photo credit: Goodreads author page)

Connect with Tim
Website | Goodreads