A Son of War
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A Son of War presents Melvyn Bragg’s second installment in what the Sunday Telegraph calls “one of the finest literary sagas of postwar Britain.” Continuing the story of the Richardson family begun in the award-winning The Soldier’s Return, this powerful novel depicts how the terrible upheavals of World War II reverberated in the peace that followed. After returning from the campaign in Burma, Sam Richardson was determined to leave his small hometown of Wigton for the promised land of Australia. Yet now, a few months later, he has settled for a job in Wigton’s paper factory, and believes he has put both his aspirations and his memories of the war behind him. His wife, Ellen, knows better, realizing how close their marriage has come to disaster. Caught between them, their young son Joe strives to fulfill their conflicting expectations for him, as he faces the challenges of childhood and adolescence and confronts his own demons.
Crafted with admirable understatement and acute insight into the twists and turns of the heart, this is a worthy successor to the highly praised The Soldier’s Return. A Son of War portrays a family forever altered by an experience subsequent generations can scarcely imagine, yet whose individual hopes, compromises, and quiet triumphs form the fabric of everyday, universal life.
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is the second volume of a trilogy that began with The Soldier's Return,about a family in a little town in Cumbria, in the northwest of England, in the years following WWII; the trilogy has been heralded in Bragg's native Britain as his masterwork. It is certainly, in its first two volumes, a highly impressive achievement, spinning an utterly convincing tale of small lives that embrace large issues of faith, courage, endurance and aspiration. Sam Richardson, a thoughtful working man whose life has been enlarged by his war experience in Burma, continues to find it difficult to settle back into Wigton, and eventually finds independence in taking over an old pub and bringing it back to life. This is hard on his wife, Ellen, whose dream of a more intimate home has to be given up; she has to realize, too, that her half-brother Colin, who suddenly surfaces with news of her cherished but mysterious father but is shifty and evasive, is not the kind of man Sam can tolerate. And young Joe, their son, entering a painful adolescence beset by nameless fears, has to straddle the disparate worlds and demands of his mother and father, trying to be at once tough and tender. Bragg has a remarkable knack for entering into the hearts and minds of his characters, and his understanding of their milieu, still an almost feudal one in many respects even in the mid 20th century, is acute. This is an old-fashioned book in the best sense: sympathetic, leisurely, absorbing and warmly believable.
