First published 2014
Alma Braithwaite lives trapped in 1963, twenty-one years after German bombs destroyed her Exeter boarding school and much of her adolescence with it. She teaches music at the same institution where she once studied, inhabiting her parents' empty house like a ghost of her former self. The war carved deep grooves in her life, and she follows them without deviation or hope. Then a new student arrives. The girl's father is someone Alma knew in 1942, someone she hasn't encountered since those chaotic months. His daughter's presence awakens memories of the summer that followed the air raids, a time when pain and excitement intertwined in ways Alma has spent decades trying to forget. Meanwhile, a confrontational new headmistress takes charge of the school. This woman refuses to let Alma drift through her duties unchanged. The combination of remembered connections and present challenges forces Alma to confront what she has become and consider what she might still choose to be.
Genres: drama, historical-fiction, 20th-century, coming-of-age, contemporary, academic
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Exeter
Period: 1942, 1963
384 pages · Kindle Edition · Sceptre
Content warnings: war