Home Fires - Hardcover

Day, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1444818031 ISBN 13: 9781444818031

Publisher: Charnwood

Synopsis

Max Weston, twenty-one and a newly commissioned lance corporal, leaves home for his first posting in central Africa. Fiercely patriotic and a natural leader, he is eager to make a difference.

He never comes back.

His parents, Caroline and Andrew, are devastated by the death of their only child. Their grief threatens to overwhelm their marriage until the empty space between them is filled by the arrival of Andrew's ninety-eight-year-old mother, Elsa. Always elegant, cutting and critical of Caroline, the old woman is now disabled and disoriented. As she lies in the spare room, the past unspools in Elsa's mind, loosening fragments of her anxious childhood with her mercurial father, who returned from the Great War a changed man.

Under one roof, the Westons come to understand each other in new ways, and the domestic stories of multiple generations coalesce into a potent exploration of the legacies of war and love.

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Day is an award-winning British journalist who has worked for the Evening Standard, the Sunday Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday, and is now a feature writer for the Observer. Her first novel, Scissors, Paper, Stone, was published in the UK and won a Betty Trask Award. Home Fires marks her U.S. debut. Day grew up in Northern Ireland, and currently lives in London with her husband. Visit her website at www.elizabethdayonline.co.uk.

From Booklist

War marks the lives of three generations of an English family in this finely wrought novel. In 1920, when Elsa is just six, her father comes home from war a changed man and begins to physically abuse her. Ninety years later, war brings tragedy again. As a young woman Elsa escapes from home, marries well, and remakes herself, bearing one child, Andrew, who falls in love with lower-class Caroline because she is so unlike his mother. In 2010, Max—the only child of Andrew and Caroline, a golden boy whom Caroline loves more than life itself—dies on duty in the Upper Nile when he steps on an IED. A marriage is strained to the point of breaking, and age and illness cause shifts in power between Caroline and Elsa, the mother-in-law she always feared. Day (Scissors, Paper, Stone, 2012) captures nuances in the relationships between her well-drawn, fallible characters, focusing on one after the other in nonchronological chapters that constitute a vivid mosaic of grief and aging. A moving family portrait. --Michele Leber

About this edition

• Publisher: Charnwood
• ISBN 10: 1444818031
• ISBN 13: 9781444818031
• Binding: Hardcover