Recommendations from our site
“It’s such a great book, a noir-ish masterpiece of intrigue and atmosphere. Everyone in the book is such a complex and alluring character. It’s set during the tail end of the Blitz. It starts at the end of 1942, and Elizabeth Bowen started writing it in 1944, so it was written very close to the events that she’s describing in the novel. She hasn’t had the t distance of time. We also know that a lot of it overlapped with Elizabeth Bowen’s own life—the main characters Stella and Robert are the same age as Bowen and her lover. Stella’s home is clearly Elizabeth Bowen’s house in Regent Park. It’s a great novel on its own, but it’s also a kind of eyewitness account of the war.” Read more...
Lori Inglis Hall, Novelist
