As well as spending time walking the former battlefields, I’ve done research for this book in the Imperial War Museum’s London Research Room, the National Army Museum’s Templer Study Centre, the Tameside Local Studies and Archives Centre, the Manchester Central Library, and the Morecambe Library.

Q: Though the history of World War I has been widely covered in both fiction and nonfiction, you focus on perspectives we don’t often hear from—the wives and families left behind after the war who are searching for their missing soldiers. What drew you to write the narrative from these viewpoints?

A: I have a particular interest in how the First World War changed women’s lives, and from researching my own great-grandmother’s experience of wartime work on a farm, I went on to write a book about how increasing numbers of women found themselves replacing men in agriculture (Holding the Home Front: The Women’s Land Army in the First World War, Pen & Sword, 2017). And, again, it was family history that initially led me to work on a book about my home city during the First World War period, and to follow the story of the battalion with which my great-grandfather served (The Manchester Bantams: The Story of a Pals Battalion and a City at War, Pen & Sword, 2017). This research is the backbone of the story in The Poppy Wife.

I’ve found that I enjoy exploring history through fiction—the opportunity that it gives you to walk around in someone else’s shoes (as it were) and the exciting challenge of really trying to breathe the air of another era. I’m fascinated by all the dislocation after the war, as it impacted both the returning men and the women at home, who also had to remake their lives, and writing this book has given me the opportunity to look more closely at that subject.

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