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| Time and Regret releases August 16 2016 |
Synopsis:When Grace Hansen finds a box belonging to her beloved grandfather, she has no idea it holds the key to his past—and to long buried secrets. In the box are his World War I diaries and a cryptic note addressed to her. Determine to solve her grandfather’s puzzle, Grace follows his diary entries across towns and battle sites in northern France, where she becomes increasingly drawn to a charming French man—and suddenly aware that someone is following her. From her grandfather’s vivid writing and Grace’s own travels, a picture emerges of a many very unlike the one who raised her: one who watched countless friends and loved ones die horrifically in battle; one who lived a life of regret. But her grandfather wasn’t the only one harbouring secrets, and the more Grace learns about her family, the less she thinks she can trust them.
Five WWI Novels that
Influenced My Writing by M.K. Tod
I write about WWI. A woman who hated history in high school,
studied math and computer science and worked in business for thirty years. Go
figure! Nonetheless, here I am busily engaged in a second career writing
historical fiction with WWI settings.
A huge leap is required to turn your life upside down and do
something completely different and I had a lot to learn about war. Beyond the
usual internet sources and history books about those times, five novels stand
out for the beauty of their writing, their evocation of sights and sounds and
the tidbits of historical detail that are seamlessly woven into the stories.
I’ve read these five, reread them, unlined sections and even marked
particularly interesting pages with little yellow stickies. They are my go-to
source whenever I need an injection of WWI atmosphere to spark my writing.
Anne Perry’s WWI
series: I read At Some Disputed
Barricade before realizing it was the fourth book about the Reavley family
and a shocking conspiracy at the highest levels of British government. Now, I’ve
read them all and not only are the story and its central mystery page turning,
but the author brings the war to life from different angles: nurse, war
chaplain, soldiers, politicians, those in the secret service.
“Every now and then
star shells went up, lighting the landscape, with its jagged tree stumps,
erratic gouges out of the clay now filled with mud and water. There were
wrecked vehicles by the side of the road and here and there carcasses of
horses, even sometimes helmets to mark where men had died. Broken gun carriages
and burned-out tanks showed up in the glare, and once the barrel of a great
cannon sticking up out of a crater, angled at the sky.”
Regeneration by Pat
Barker: I began with Pat Barker’s Life
Class and then read Regeneration,
a novel that has won awards for its powerful writing and exploration of war’s
effect on the mind and soul. It is based on real experiences of British
officers like Vidal Sassoon who suffered from shell-shock and were treated at
Craiglockhart War Hospital. The Regeneration Trilogy includes two other novels:
The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road.
“Sometimes, in the
trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had
skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe
they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year
ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war,
and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep
voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived.”
Birdsong by Sebastian
Faulks: I’ve rarely been in a
conversation about WWI without someone mentioning Birdsong. Its renown has reached almost mythical proportions. The
novel begins in 1910 with a young Englishman who arrives in Amiens for work. A
clandestine love affair tears apart the family with whom he lives and sets the
stage for his war experiences. A compelling tale of the human spirit and a
condemnation of war.
“He was awed by the
sound the guns were making; so many of them in rolling sequence on a line of
sixteen miles, the heaviest providing the continuous rumble like a sustained
roll of timpani, and the lighter adding unpredictable pattern and emphasis.
Within an hour the whole line was pouring out shells, filling the night with a
dense traffic of metal. The noise like thunder breaking in uninterrupted
waves.”
Three Day Road by Joseph
Boyden: This haunting story combines the experiences of two Cree snipers in
the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme with the journey one of them takes to
get home after the war. Joseph Boyden is a celebrated Canadian author whose
writing deserves words like powerful, passionate, extraordinary and inspiring.
“You hear the thunk of
a mortar land close to you, know you can run away from it if you’re quick. It’s
the only bomb you can do that with. The big shells you can hear coming from a
long way off and just pray that they aren’t heading for you. Now listen careful,
boys, it’s the smaller shells, the whiz-bangs, that are the most damaging, the
ones that sound like a mosquito whining in the distance. You hear them coming
and you dive flat into the earth and bury your nose deep as you can into the
mud.”
The First Casualty by Ben
Elton: Elton gives us a story about a man who investigates a murder amidst
the Third Battle of Ypres. It explores some fundamental questions: What is
murder? What is justice in the face of unimaginable daily slaughter? And where
is the honour in saving a man from the gallows if he is only to be returned to
die in suicidal battle?
“Kingsley was now only
a hundred yards from the front but the going was very slow. First he had to
traverse along the reserve trench in order to reach a communication trench that
would take him up to the support line. The trenches were fashioned in a zigzag
pattern resembling a series of cogs: viewed from the air, they would appear
like a battlement stretched out across the ground. This design was to minimize
the effect of the blast from a shell landing directly in a trench and exploding
out along it, or of the enemy getting in and setting up a machine gun which
could then rake along the line.”
I could continue quoting from these novels to show how they
illuminate the sights, sounds, smells and conditions of war as well as everyday
matters such as how to assemble a rifle, walk along duckboards, make tea in the
midst of filth, comfort a wounded soldier, reinforce a trench, heft a sandbag,
don a gasmask, lay wire for signaling purposes and on and on. These aren’t the
only novels about WWI that I’ve read but they have inspired my writing and will
continue to do so.
M.K.
Tod writes historical fiction and blogs about all aspects of the genre at A Writer of History.
Her latest novel, TIME
AND REGRET was published by Lake Union on August 16, 2016. Mary’s other novels, LIES
TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon,
Nook, Kobo, Google Play and
iTunes.
She can be contacted on Facebook,
Twitter
and Goodreads
or on her website www.mktod.com.
When Grace Hansen finds a box belonging to her beloved
grandfather, she has no idea it holds the key to his past—and to long buried
secrets. In the box are his World War I diaries and a cryptic note addressed to
her. Determine to solve her grandfather’s puzzle, Grace follows his diary
entries across towns and battle sites in northern France, where she becomes
increasingly drawn to a charming French man—and suddenly aware that someone is
following her.
Amazon US
Amazon Canada
Amazon UK
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