Ruby is just twenty-one, a shy Englishwoman looking for the grave of her husband. Alice is only a little older but brimming with confidence; she has travelled all the way from America, convinced her brother is in fact still alive. Then there’s Martha and her son Otto, who are not all they seem to be . . .

The three women may have very different backgrounds, but they are united in their search for reconciliation: to resolve themselves to what the war took from them, but also to what life might still promise for the future . . .

Read on now for an extract . . .

1

RUBY

July 1919

It was like the strangest of dreams, standing here on the deck of the steamship, with the blue sky above, the sun glittering off the sea like a million diamonds. To her right, the grey slate roofs of the little town huddled almost apologetically beneath those magnificent cliffs, so much higher and more brilliantly white than she’d ever imagined.

She could scarcely believe that she was about to leave the shores of England for the first time in her life. It was not an adventure she had sought, much less desired. Why would she want to cross that treacherous stretch of water, the English Channel, to visit a country so recently torn apart by four years of terrifying, tragic events? She was still only twenty-one and she considered that her short life had been tragic enough, thank you very much, without inviting further danger and heartache.

What she most wanted, now that peace was here, was to live a quiet, ordered life, honouring his memory by working hard and trying to be kind to others who grieved like her. There were plenty of them, for heaven’s sake. No family had been left untouched by the tragedy. She would keep herself to herself, would never allow anyone else to break her heart. It’s the best I can do, she wrote in her diary, the only thing I can do, when he’s given his future to make ours safe from the Hun. How else can we make sense of it all?

So when, after serving tea that early June afternoon, his parents solemnly sat her down in one of their overstuffed armchairs and presented her with the Thomas Cook brochure, she’d thought at first it was some kind of a joke.

‘Tours to the battlefields of Belgium and France,’ she read out loud. ‘Why on earth would anyone want to go and gawp at the place . . .?’

She saw Ivy wince, and the words faded in her mouth. Her mother-in-law was as fragile as cut glass, unable to accept that her only child was dead. Never an outgoing person, her health had been frail for as long as Ruby had known the family, which seemed like forever.

When they’d first started courting, she thought it odd that he rarely invited her back to his house. ‘Mam’s a bit poorly,’ he’d say, or, ‘She complains that I make a mess.’ Now, Ivy was a feeble whisper of a woman, barely of this world, with a ghost-like pallor from lack of fresh air. She spent much of her time in bed, or at least in her bedroom.