Charlotte Sometimes

“She’s written a number of novels, mostly children’s novels, but this is the one that she’s best known for. This is partly because it is the title of The Cure’s sixth single, which is a take on the story in this book. To call this an underrated existentialist classic might be a little bit of a stretch, because I don’t think that it is presenting a theory, or the theory that existence precedes essence, or anything like that. But it is a meditation on the kinds of questions, and the kinds of reasons, why people might come to that theory..” Read more...

Underrated Existentialist Classics

Jonathan Webber, Philosopher

“This book is the first war book I read and it made a deep impression on me. I read it when I was about nine or ten. It’s a book for children, published in 1969. The Charlotte of the title is a twelve year old girl who goes to boarding school and goes to sleep in a dormitory in a bed which has a funny set of wheels on it, and wakes up fifty years earlier in 1918. She has swapped places with a girl called Clare, who in 1918 was sleeping in the same bed. We don’t hear from Clare’s point of view, what she makes of 1969 or 1968, but we do hear about Charlotte, who finds herself in the final year of the First World War.” Read more...

The Best War Writing

Kate McLoughlin, Literary Scholar