She sees her son on every street corner, but he is always facing away from her.

Unlike her neighbours, she never received information about where he was buried, so she is left in a kind of limbo, unable to get closure. Her lover was killed during the conflict, causing her to build an impenetrable barrier around herself to prevent anyone from ever getting close to her again.Īda lost her only son, Michael, in the war. Unemployment is rife, food scarce and every family has been touched and scarred forever by the events of the preceding years.Įvelyn knows all about the heartbreak caused by war. This is a country reeling from the aftermath of the Great War. We often hear the term Broken Britain in reference to modern society, but the Britain presented in Wake epitomises the term completely. Those five days will change the lives of three women forever. Click here to buy it for £6.Summary: The book follows the journey of the body of the unknown warrior to his final resting place, over the course of five days. This is not a welcoming world for heroes it’s a society in mourning, awkwardly on the cusp of momentous change and upheaval, the delicate nuances of which Hope captures with a crystal clarity, her story a moving account of a collection of lost souls searching for their place in life. This new world opening up for women is set sharply against the lives of the broken men all around them: men crippled by war, their limbs severed in battle others whose wounds aren’t so visible, those of whom only “the empty, silent shell remained”, men who’ve had life “blasted” out of them then there’s the “temporary gentlemen”, “now stuck between society’s strata”. She grew up under it, like a great squatting thing, leaching all the colour and joy from life.” She’s hungry for “something more”, wants to bob her hair and embrace excitement.

And, finally, Hettie, the youngest of the three, a dancer at the Hammersmith Palais who wants nothing more than to forget the past: “It went on long enough.

Bitter Evelyn, living a “grey” existence, everything dulled by the loss of her lover. There’s Ada, a housewife and mother haunted by the beloved son she lost in battle, searching for the closure she needs to move on. The war informs the novel on every level, hanging heavily over the text, but it’s very much a story set in the aftermath of the conflict as Hope neatly constructs the lives of her fictional characters – a trio of women – around this very real event.

Wake by Anna Hope