The Soldier's Wife
A Novel
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3.6 • 8 Ratings
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN LOVE AND DUTY COLLIDE?
DAN RILEY IS A MAJOR IN THE BRITISH ARMY. After a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, he is coming home to the wife and young daughters he adores. He’s up for promotion and his ex-Army grandfather and father couldn’t be prouder. The Rileys are united in support of Dan’s passion for his career.
But are they really? His wife, Alexa, has been offered a good teaching job she can’t take because the Army may move the family at any time. Her daughter Isabel hates her boarding school—the only good educational option for Army families—and starts running away. And Dan spends all his time on the base, unable to break the strong bonds forged with his friends in battle. Soon everyone who knows the Rileys is trying to help them save their marriage, but it’s up to Alexa to decide if she can sacrifice her needs and those of her family to support Dan’s commitment to his work.
With her trademark intelligence and grace, Joanna Trollope illuminates the complexities of modern life in this story of a family striving to balance duty and ambition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Trollope's dull newest (after Daughters-in-Law), British Army Major Dan Riley has just returned home from a six-month stay in Afghanistan. His wife, Alexa, has been holding down the fort, juggling young twins and an older daughter, Isabel, who is desperately unhappy in boarding school. And though Dan is glad to reunite with his family, his homecoming is marred by his inability to readjust to civilian life. Dan spends the bulk of his time at the base with his best friend, Gus, whose wife has just left him, while Alexa yearns for a life apart from the Army one in which she can seek out her own career as a teacher. But with a potential promotion on the horizon, Dan struggles with the prospect of giving up a career that his father and grandfather before him proudly pursued, and to which he has become deeply linked. While the subject matter is timely and rife with possibilities, Trollope fails to adequately engage with the complexities of PTSD or the reentry of veterans into domestic life. Trollope's writing is consistent but consistently unexciting.
