Evangeline is 29 and pregnant. She thinks about the baby she is about to have, and remembers her own mother who died when she was eight. She is sent to live on a Welsh farm with her grandparents who she had never met; she adapts, and develops a deep affection for them, the farm and the landscape. Eve Green is an observant novel, sensitively written, with close detail that allows the reader to become absorbed in the world of the story. Fletcher writes with a great sense of affection for people and place and, although I was astonished to find the editor had missed the phrase ‘bored of’, there are some deft touches; ‘I felt that our secrets had been pressed together, twisted into the same shape, and that they couldn’t be peeled apart again.’ Memories are interwoven with her childhood perspective of detail from one long, hot summer, when a girl from the village went missing. Fletcher inserts little pieces of supposition, as a child might speculate, and builds up tension around Eve’s childhood narrative. This is a really gentle novel which evokes a strong sense of place and with some lovely turns of phrase to savour.
Glorious 39 strips away illusions. Poliakoff presents the apparent idyll of an English aristocratic family headed by genteel patriarch Lord Keyes (Bill Nighy). He presides over a country estate in Norfolk and his elegant townhouse in London – a world of golden light, romantic ruins, servants, house parties and happy children. But this is 1939, a mere 21 years since the Great War, the war to end all wars, in which millions died, Britain was crippled with war debt, and the English country house system which he so values was almost annihilated. There are many references to the ancientness of his family and tradition, but now, few male servants remained alive or unmaimed to work the English landscape or to be in service to the old families. Fearing domestic and political upheaval, appeasers such as Keyes sought to prevent Churchill leading the country and taking Britan to war, and to buy off Hitler to preserve British cultural and national identity. Nighty is excellent, contro...
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