Shelagh's extended conversation with Anna Hope and Jennifer Robson
The First World War has inspired many powerful works of fiction. But most of this literature has centred on the men in the trenches and their struggles in the aftermath of the conflict. Debut novelists Anna Hope and Jennifer Robson take readers into the hearts and minds of women whose lives have been irrevocably changed by the war. ...
The First World War has inspired many powerful works of fiction. But most of this literature has centred on the men in the trenches and their struggles in the aftermath of the conflict. Debut novelists Anna Hope and Jennifer Robson take readers into the hearts and minds of women whose lives have been irrevocably changed by the war.
British writer Anna Hope sets her first novel, Wake, two years after the end of the First World War, at a time when the body of the unknown soldier is returned to Britain. The British soldiers who died overseas had been buried where they fell or in mass graveyards on the continent. So for a grieving country, the unknown soldier is a potent national symbol. Wake follows the lives of three women who are still haunted by the war, and struggling to come to terms with loss.
In Somewhere in France, Canadian author Jennifer Robson's debut novel, a young English woman rebels against the constrictions of her upper-class upbringing and goes to France to become an ambulance driver on the western front.