“The Lie“ by Helen Dunmore:
Two years after hostilities of First World War have ended Daniel, a young soldier, returns to his place of birth on the Cornish Coast, alone, without money, home or relatives.
He is a shell-shocked survivor and his first-person account recounts the horrors of the trenches in France where he lost his closest friend since boyhood, Frederick, who perished alongside him in a shell-hole on the western front.
In search for shelter he offers help and assistance to an elderly blind woman who soon after dies of pneumonia and, in fulfilling her wish, buries her in her own garden.
He struggles to make a living in the aftermath of war, he works on the land, but is drawn deeper and deeper into the traumas of his past and the memories of his dearest friend and first love, now dead. Daniel has survived the war but the horror and passion of the past stay with him and seem more real than the quiet landscape that surrounds him.
He also comes to the aid of Frederick's grieving sister Felicia, now a war-widow living alone with her infant daughter in the cold, grand house where Daniel once played with her and Frederick and had free access to a big library and the whole fascinating world of books.
He has not told her the full truth of how her brother met his death and he hasn’t told the truth about the absence of the old woman and slowly the village people grow suspicious.
I thought it a well written book, an often very touching narration, full of descriptive prose. Yet, I was left with no redemption, only a sad hopelessness and a feeling of great injustice.
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