My Dear I Wanted to Tell You - Hardcover

Young, Louisa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 144585788X ISBN 13: 9781445857886

Publisher: Windsor, 2011

Synopsis

Set on the Western Front, in London and in Paris, MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU is a moving and brilliant novel of love, class and sex in wartime, and how war affects those left behind as well as those who fight.

While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country, their survival and their sanity in the trenches of Flanders, Nadine Waveney, Julia Locke and Rose Locke do what they can at home.

Beautiful, obsessive Julia and gentle, eccentric Peter are married: each day Julia goes through rituals to prepare for her beloved husband’s return. Nadine and Riley, only eighteen when the war starts, and with problems of their own already, want above all to make promises - but how can they when the future is not in their hands? And Rose? Well, what did happen to the traditionally brought-up women who lost all hope of marriage, because all the young men were dead?

About this title

Review:

‘This is the finest Great War novel since Susan Hill's ‘Strange Meeting’. Louisa Young weaves the experiences of her characters using an urgent, theatrical, staccato style that is probably best appreciated as an audio book, especially when read by the phenomenal Dan Stevens, who invests the characters with an immediately recognisable individuality whether they are thinking, writing, speaking – or, indeed, desperately trying to speak’
Independent on Sunday

‘Every once in a while comes a novel that generates its own success, simply by being loved. Louisa Young’s My Dear I Wanted to Tell You inspires the kind of devotion among its readers not seen since David Nicholls’ One Day’
The Times

‘Birdsong for the new millennium’
Tatler

‘Powerful, sometimes shocking, boldly conceived, it fixes on war’s lingering trauma to show how people adapt – or not – and is irradiated by anger and pity’
The Sunday Times

‘[A] tender, elegiac novel. Others have been here before, of course, from Sebastian Faulks to Pat Barker, but Young belongs in their company’
Mail on Sunday

‘Unmissable ... in crisp poignant prose Young explores what war really means in terms of mental anguish, while cleverly commenting on class and sex’
Marie Claire

‘Weaving heartbreakingly painful irony, heroic sacrifice, human weakness, vanity, tragedy and the purest of loves, you’ll be left sobbing and grasping onto any hope that all is not lost amid the poppies, the guns and the hospital beds’
Easy Living

‘A memorable and unusual novel which explores new ground in the literature of the Great War’
Linda Grant

‘This novel is a triumph’
Elizabeth Jane Howard

From the Back Cover:

The lives of two very different couples--an officer and his aristocratic wife, and a young soldier and his childhood sweetheart--are irrevocably intertwined and forever changed in this stunning World War I epic of love and war.

At eighteen years old, working-class Riley Purefoy and "posh" Nadine Waveney have promised each other the future, but when war erupts across Europe, everything they hold to be true is thrown into question. Dispatched to the trenches, Riley forges a bond of friendship with his charismatic commanding officer, Peter Locke, as they fight for their survival. Yet it is Locke's wife, Julia, who must cope with her husband's transformation into a distant shadow of the man she once knew. Meanwhile, Nadine and Riley's bonds are tested as well by a terrible injury and the imperfect rehabilitation that follows it, as both couples struggle to weather the storm of war that rages about them.

Moving among Ypres, London, and Paris, this emotionally rich and evocative novel is both a powerful exploration of the lasting effects of war on those who fight--and those who don't--and a poignant testament to the enduring power of love.

About this edition

• Publisher: Windsor
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 144585788X
• ISBN 13: 9781445857886
• Binding: Hardcover