Men Of Letters - Duncan Barrett - Author Q&A

Today I am very pleased to welcome author Duncan Barrett to the blog! 

His new book Men of Letters is out now. (AA Publishing, £8.99, softback)

Hi Duncan, please could you tell us a bit about your new book Men of Letters?

Men of Letters tells the true stories of some of the thousands of Post Office workers who went off to fight in the trenches during the First World War, in particular those who served with the organisation's own battalion the Post Office Rifles. Based on their trench diaries and the letters they wrote home from the western front, it looks at every aspect of their experiences of war, from the rituals of daily life in the trenches (in particular the importance for morale of regular mail and food packages from home) to the terrible slaughter of the Somme and Passchendaele, when men saw former post office colleagues suddenly killed alongside them. These very ordinary men living through extraordinary times give us a glimpse of the war as the average tommy experienced it. 

What drew you to this topic - I understand that there is a personal link in your family to the Post Office Rifles? 

Actually, the only personal link to the POR story is that my great-great-uncle fought alongside them in the battle for High Wood in September 1916, and like many of the PORs he was killed there. But I didn’t actually realise the connection until I began researching their stories. I visited High Wood as part of my research for the book, hoping to see the land where they fought and he died. Sadly, though, the only people allowed inside these days are those who come to shoot game birds in the wood. 

Do you enjoy researching the books that you write, and how easy/difficult was it to find out about this topic in order to put your book together?

I was very lucky that there is a wealth of material on the Post Office Rifles held at the Imperial War Museum, and also at the British Postal Museum and Archive. Many of the PORs shared their own stories with each other before they died, and some of these were printed in the POR Association newsletters. I also had access to lots of the original letters they wrote to their loved ones from the front lines, which helped me to get to know them on a personal level. I found the research fascinating – although occasionally I did find it frustrating that all the people I was writing about were no longer alive. With my previous books, The Sugar Girls and GI Brides, which are both based on interviewees with living subjects, I’ve always been able to pick up the phone if I realised something was confusing me. 

Do you find the writing process addictive - is it hard to stop once you get going?

To be honest, I find that I’m always on such a tight deadline that I don’t have time to stop even if I wanted to! But certainly, you do get into the flow of writing once you’ve been doing it for a while. The first few weeks on a new book are always the hardest, trying to get back into that daily rhythm again. Then after a while it begins to get more enjoyable!

I really enjoyed your book about The Sugar Girls. How do you decide what you want to write about next? 

Generally, I find that working on one book I start to have ideas about the next one. When my partner Nuala and I were researching The Sugar Girls, we spent a lot of time interviewing old ladies in the East End, and Nuala started to think, ‘I’m getting to know all these other people’s grandmothers, but I’ve never really interviewed my own grandmother.’ When The Sugar Girls was out of the way, she spent several days talking to her grandmother Margaret, and hearing about her experiences as a GI Bride in WW2 – and that inspired us to write our next book about the GI Brides. One of the women we wrote about in that book was in the ATS during the war, and we were so fascinated by that aspect of her war experience that we decided our third book would be about women in the forces – we’re working on that now, and it should be in shops March 2015. Men of Letters was a little bit different in that the publisher approached me about writing something to do with the First World War, to tie in with the Centenary this year. I wanted it to be a story that focused on ordinary men on the front lines, and if possible using some of their own words – we eventually agreed on a book about the Post Office Rifles (a battalion of ordinary postmen and telegram boys) incorporating the letters they wrote home. 

Thank you for answering my questions Duncan!

Before the Fall - Juliet West

'How can I be sorry when I feel like this, as if my life has started up brand new, sharp and colourful, a swirl of terror and bliss like I'm lost in a fairground...'

Before the Fall is a very well-crafted and compelling debut novel set in London during World War One. It tells of Hannah Loxwood, a mother of two young children, her husband away fighting, who has been forced to move in with her sister and brother-in-law, with her sister  Jen, who she feels has never really liked her, minding the children whilst Hannah works in a café, striving for a bit of freedom. Her father is very unwell and the family is struggling. She has a good friend in wonderful Dora, who works at the munitions factory. 

Daniel Blake works as a ship repairer and is exempted from the war, and is one of the customers who come into the café. An intelligent, sensitive soul, I found him easy to like and warm to, and I was interested to read about his background, and his love of books. There is a mutual, dangerous attraction between Daniel and Hannah. 

I was drawn into the story and wondered, how will things play out, how will it end? The story grabbed me from the beginning and is well-paced throughout, with a strong sense of place and time being evoked. The characters felt true and of their time to me. I loved the mentions of, and connections with, Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure. I also thought Hannah's feelings about crossing the real bridge to get around where she lived mirrored well the bridge she had to cross to change her life:

'It's as if I'm caught in the centre of an unending bridge. On one side lies my old life; on the other side...What?'

Events at the munitions factory, as well as bombs falling on the city, evoke the tragedy and fear of those back at home during the war.

I was sad that Hannah hadn't felt for her husband what she felt for Daniel, and also sad that he was away fighting, but I also understood that sometimes these chances, these intense, intimate connections felt for someone only come once, and at the wrong time, meaning awful decisions must be made between duty and desire, with people getting hurt whichever path is taken. The author writes in a lovely style, both literary and very readable. The ending makes for surprising and heartbreaking reading. 

Thanks to amazon vine for a review copy of this novel. 

Published by Mantle

Tilly's Promise - Linda Newbery

'It seemed that the war itself was the enemy and the men on both sides must struggle to survive. The war was a hungry monster, always wanting more.'

I won a copy of this book in a competition on facebook, with thanks to the publisher. I was first attracted by the gorgeous cover, the design of which is discussed inside the book (read more via the link below), and by the writer's name, as I've read and enjoyed some fiction by this author before. Also the period setting, being a First World War tale, made me want to read it.

The story tells of Tilly Peacock and Harry, young sweethearts who both make a promise to each other, and learn that promises, even whilst made with love and the best of intentions, can prove difficult to keep. Harry goes off to fight in France, and Tilly volunteers as a nurse, this role taking her away from her home, and eventually to France. Tilly's dear kindhearted brother Georgie has learning difficulties, however, despite this, he is later called up to fight too. Tilly asks Harry to promise he'll look after Georgie. Neither of them can know what they will face in the years ahead, and how difficult things will be for them both. 

Linda Newbery includes details of the times in her narrative but is never heavy-handed with it. The awful reality of war for the men fighting, on both sides, is conveyed insightfully in the way Tilly comes to see men on both sides as victims, having treated injured German soldiers too, something that initially upset her, but she soon thinks of them differently; 

'It was strange to care for men from the other side. I couldn't help thinking that one of them might have killed James Milton or fired the shell that wounded Harry. But soon I stopped thinking of them as 'the enemy'. They were victims of war, like the others I'd seen. They didn't hate the British soldiers.'

Tilly's Promise is a moving, well-written and engaging story told with honesty and warmth, and I really enjoyed reading it.

This book is labelled as being dyslexia friendly, and the publisher specialises in bringing books to those for whom their may be barriers to enjoying reading; they design their books to try and minimise the barriers - read more here. I love the cream-coloured pages and the clear, decent-sized font. At just under 90 pages, the story is substantial enough but not so long as to be daunting. I imagine that all these aspects, and the others that they've thought about, are of a real help to uncertain or reluctant readers. This is the first book I've read from this publisher and on the basis of this one I'd certainly look out for others in the future. 

Published by Barrington Stoke - Edinburgh-based independent publishers, specialists in dyslexia-friendly books for children and teenagers.

Read more about the creation of this beautiful book cover by artist Stewart Easton here

Author website | Barrington Stoke on twitter @BarringtonStoke | 

A Woman's Choice - Annie Thomas - Author Guest Post

I am very pleased to welcome Annie Thomas, author of the novel A Woman's Choice, to the blog today and to share with you her brilliant guest post, below, discussing historical fiction. 

Who wants to see history in a great historical novel?

by author Annie Thomas

What is it that separates a magnificent historical novel from the rest?

The answer lies not in superb writing, compelling plot, characters we can believe in, and a book that reveals some truth about the human condition – although all of that is of course a pre-requisite for magnificence.

It’s the history.  The history that we don’t notice but which we absorb with every word we read.

We recognise that the world we have entered is entirely authentic, while remaining unconscious of the research that made it that way.  This is not about accuracy of historical detail – right food, right clothes, right transport - that just has to be a given.  It is about understanding that the past is not always a foreign country, as L.P Hartley believed in ‘The Go-Between’. Sometimes they may do things differently there, but there are also times when they behave and think very much as we do.

It is the history that gives us the social and political context, the public landscape in which lives are lived. Historical fiction brings us vicarious experience; we can read about the impact of anti-German rhetoric and prejudice in early 20thC America on the lives of individuals we have come to know and care about, for example. It tells us something about the human capacity for bigotry, while the ways our characters respond to that tells us something about the strength of friendship.

Anne Fine, UK Children’s Laureate in 2002, described ‘The Seeing Stone’, Kevin Crossley-Holland’s wonderful historical novel, published for children but read by all ages, like this:  “a world so real that you can run your fingertips over its walls, feel its morning frost bite at your throat, and remember the people who lived there for a lifetime.”

What a testimonial.

As a relatively new writer, I know the temptation to expose rather than conceal the research.  So many hours are spent reading and thinking, making notes and making connections between the imaginary world and the real one.

Sometimes I have come across a contemporaneous description of an incident or place, and instantly seen my characters there. I know just what they would have said and done, and have even written whole chapters of many hundred words to add texture and credibility by putting them there.   It is a hard learned discipline to go back over the draft; recognising the slowing of pace, or the inconsequential diversion, and cut, and cut again, until the story is released to flow again as it should.

However, it is also undoubtedly true, that sometimes the research helps to shape the narrative.  In my own novel, set in New York, the books and newspaper accounts about the lives of emigrants at the turn of the century, (particularly women), became translated into the lives of my characters.  Sometimes they even helpfully provided the inspiration for a pivotal moment in the plot.

Philippa Gregory has described the period when Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton and Georgette Heyer were at their peak as a ‘golden age’ of historical fiction.  She is now herself part of a group of contemporary writers which could rightfully claim to be leading a new golden age.  Others include Elizabeth Chadwick and Hilary Mantel, and now Eleanor Catton.  All have very different styles and approaches.  All have that necessary lightness of touch, that deft ability to interweave narrative and context that creates the best in both popular and literary historical fiction.  All are wonderful storytellers, but never at the expense of the history, so we come away even more enriched by our reading.

As a reader I want to feel enthralled and fulfilled.  I want to unconsciously absorb a perspective about the times and the humanity - and to do that through the imaginative leap of seeing through the eyes of another person.

As a writer of popular rather than literary fiction, I want to get it right, to be a good historian – and then to conceal that scholarship with creativity and an absorbing read. Popular fiction may not bring readers a profound truth.  But it can bring insight, perspective, and a measure of understanding, in a cracking good story.

I guess that’s something we all keep striving to achieve.

~~~~~

About the author...

Annie Thomas is a British writer, and the author of ‘A Woman’s Choice’.  Brought up in London, after a degree in English and History she now works in an English university, and lives in a rural converted Victorian converted pub where rumour has it that Tolkein and C.S.Lewis once stopped for a beer on one of their many walks together.

www.anniethomasbooks.com

About the novel...

Set in the vibrancy of early twentieth century New York, the story follows the young emigrant Clara and the people she meets on the way, through tenement living and sweatshop labour to success. But as the horror of World War One in Europe threatens to engulf America, Clara learns that personal lives cannot be lived apart from public events, and finds that the people she has loved, and who love her, are not always what they seem. All the incidents in ‘A Woman’s Choice’ are based on what really happened to many thousands of emigrant families. It is a compelling saga of friendship, love and ambition.

Amazon/AWomansChoice

The Moon Field - Judith Allnatt

The novel opens with an intriguing prologue in which a tin box and its contents are described; immediately the reader is keen to discover the provenance of these objects. It is 1914, and eighteen-year-old George Farrell is a postman who has befriended, and secretly fallen for, Violet Walter, a young woman whose grand home he delivers to on his rounds in the villages around the fells in the Northern Lake District. One day, he delivers a letter to Violet, preparing to declare his true emotions to her, however, when she reveals the contents of the letter - she is in love with another man - he knows he cannot. Desperately disappointed, he flees, makes some new friends, drowns his sorrows, and against his peace-loving family’s wishes, and indeed his own prior pacifist beliefs, he enlists to fight in the war. Those he leaves behind, his family and his colleagues at the post office, including the owner’s daughter, George’s dear best friend Kitty, await anxiously for news.

The Moon Field is a moving story of the innocence, joy and pain of young love and of a changing society in a world altered forever, told through understated yet powerful prose. Judith Allnatt writes beautifully, with honesty and compassion, about 1914-15, the bravery of George in going to fight, the tragedy and futility he sees, his loved ones at home always fearing the worst but hoping for the best.

I loved the strong evocation of time and place, the feeling of an ordinary, decent young man’s innocence being lost forever so that he no longer recognises in himself the man he was before, and the idea of whether it is possible to rediscover joy in life after witnessing such senseless loss and experiencing desperate sadness. 

The Moon Field is a very good read, and a timely and fitting novel with 2014 seeing the centenary of the start of World War One – it reminds us of what must have been the terrible reality of those times; ordinary young men like George heroically offering themselves up in the patriotic defence of their country, only to discover the cruel realities and horror of the war.

Source - We Love This Book - thanks to them for a review copy of this novel

Publisher - HarperCollins - 16th January 2014