The Summer Before the War

“Simonson is like a Jane Austen for our day and age—she is that good.” —Paula McLain, New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife

Internationally bestselling author Helen Simonson returns with a splendid historical novel full of the same wit, romance and insight into the manners and morals of small-town British life as her beloved Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.

East Sussex, 1914. It is the end of England’s brief Edwardian summer, and in the idyllic coastal town of Rye, Agatha Kent has just risked her carefully built reputation by pushing for the appointment of a woman to replace the Latin master. When Beatrice Nash arrives with one trunk and several large crates of books, it is clear she is significantly more freethinking—and attractive—than anyone believes a Latin teacher should be. Mourning the death of her beloved father, Beatrice simply wants to be left alone—much to the dismay of Agatha’s nephew, Hugh Grange, a medical student on leave. But just as Beatrice comes alive to the beauty of the Sussex landscape and the colourful characters who populate Rye, the perfect summer is about to end. For the unimaginable is coming. Soon the limits of progress, and the old ways, will be tested as this small town and its inhabitants go to war.