A Son at the Front

Paris, the summer of 1914. John Campton, a celebrated American painter long settled in France, is finally about to take his beloved son George on the trip they have been planning for years. Father and son, just the two of them, at last.

Then the world ends. Or at least, the world they knew.

War sweeps across Europe, and George – born on French soil, technically liable for service – is called up. What follows is not the war itself but the long, agonising shadow it casts on those left behind: a divorced father and mother forced back into one another's lives, a stepfather with money and influence, a circle of Parisian friends watching their city change around them, and a son somewhere out there at the front, his letters arriving thinner and stranger as the months grind on.

First published in 1923, A Son at the Front is Edith Wharton's quietly searing novel of the home front – drawn from the years she herself spent in wartime Paris, organising relief efforts and watching a generation of young men disappear into the trenches. It is a book about love, helplessness, and the particular cruelty of waiting. About what it means to be a parent when your child is somewhere you cannot reach.

A lesser-known masterpiece from the author of The Age of Innocence, written with all of Wharton's precision, wit, and devastating emotional clarity.

A novel about the war that doesn't take place on the battlefield – the one fought in drawing rooms, in letters, in the long silences between them.