Unexploded

A novel of fine-tuned beauty, sharp insight and emotional subtlety – about a family in the shadow of WWII

May, 1940. Brighton. Wartime.

On Park Crescent, a sunlit and usually tranquil street, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news. The enemy is expected to land on the beaches of Brighton any day.

It is a year of tension and change. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, while young Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton’s Royal Pavilion his English HQ. He spends hours with his friends imagining life in Brighton under Hitler’s rule. And as the rumours continue to fly and the days tick on, Evelyn struggles to fall in with the war effort and the constraints of her role in life, her thoughts becoming tinged with a mounting, indefinable desperation.

Then she meets Otto Gottlieb, a ‘degenerate’ German-Jewish painter and prisoner in her husband’s internment camp. As Europe crumbles, Evelyn’s and Otto’s mutual distrust slowly begins to change into something else, which will shatter the structures on which her life, her family and her community rest.

Love collides with fear, the power of art with the forces of war, and the lives of Evelyn, Otto, and Geoffrey are changed irrevocably.

Alison MacLeod grew up in Montreal and Halifax, and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of two novels, The Changeling and The Wave Theory of Angels, and a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester and lives in Brighton.