So Much Life Left Over
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- €4.99
Publisher Description
A heartbreaking story of love, loss and survival following the unforgettable Daniel Pitt. From the multi-million copy bestselling author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin.
Returning from life as a fighter pilot in the First World War, Daniel Pitt is struggling to put the trauma of the Western Front behind him.
As the 1920s dawn, he and his wife Rosie move to a tea plantation in Ceylon with their small daughter to make a fresh start. Yet navigating their new world could test their marriage to its limits.
Back in England, Rosie's sisters are dealing with impossible challenges in their searches for family, purpose and happiness. These are precarious times, and taking unconventional means may be the only way to get what they want. Around them the world changes, and events in Germany take a dark and forbidding turn. And soon there is no going back...
For more adventures with flying ace Daniel Pitt, see The Dust That Falls From Dreams and The Autumn of the Ace.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We adored the colourful, brilliantly drawn characters in Louis de Bernière’s The Dust that Falls from Dreams, so we were delighted to meet many of them again in this sequel. Having settled in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) after World War I, fighter pilot Daniel Pitt and his wife Rosie head to England as their marriage begins to fracture. There, friends and family are dealing with personal tragedies and absorbing the horrors of one war while another slowly begins to loom. De Bernière’s story spans two decades, travelling from Asia to Britain and on into occupied Europe and immersing us in appealingly quirky personalities, deep heartache and a radiant sense of time and place.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
England between the two world wars is revisited in this witty and heartfelt novel. Daniel Pitt, a former RFC pilot, is married to Rosie McCosh and runs a tea factory in Ceylon. His brother, Archie, a solider on the North-West Frontier (what is present-day Pakistan), is secretly in love with Rosie just as Rosie's spinster sister, Ottilie, back at home in England, is secretly in love with Archie. Readers also meet Rosie's other sister, Christabel, a bohemian who has a special relationship with Gaskell, a female barnstorming artist; Oily Wragge, the gardener on the McCosh family estate, who suffers from nightmares about his war experiences; and various and sundry mistresses of unhappily married Daniel, who bear him several illegitimate children over the years. Through a variety of points of view, de Berni res (Corelli's Mandolin) creates an impressionistic depiction of Britain recovering from one world war and slipping inexorably into another as motion pictures begin to talk, land and air records are set, and Daniel and his friends and family heroically try to adjust to changing times. The novel is light on plot, but the characters are such excellent company that it makes for an irresistible reading experience, especially for fans of Downton Abbey.
