Sally Nicholls
2022-09-20
A beautiful, bittersweet WWI romance lights up an English village at Christmas with harrowing secrets, love lost and found, and the breathtaking power of forgiveness.
Vivid and achingly real, Sally Nicholls’s latest historical romance explores the fallout from an unexpected pregnancy during the First World War. It’s Christmastime, 1919. Three years before, seventeen-year-old Margot Allan, a respectable vicar’s daughter, fell passionately in love. But she lost her fiancé, Harry, to the Great War. In turn, she gained a desperate secret, one with the power to ruin her life and her family’s reputation, a secret she guards at all costs. Now Margot’s family is gathering at the vicarage for the first time since the War ended. And Harry, it turns out, isn’t dead. He’s alive and well, and looking for answers. Can their love survive the truth? Based on the author’s family history, this evocative and stirring exploration of the human and emotional side of war is young-adult historical fiction at its finest, written with the immediacy and understanding of the complexities of the human heart that are the hallmark of the author’s work.
Kent's historical fiction delivers a masterclass in crafting an atmosphere steeped in the tumultuous spirit of the 19th century. The narrative, while grounded in the factual backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, ventures into territories where the boundaries between the ordinary and the supernatural blur. It's a narrative that commands attention with its meticulously constructed world and the nuanced portrayal of its characters, reflecting a depth of historical insight that resonates with my appreciation for realism and moral complexity.
