THE EVENING CHORUS - Softcover

HUMPHREYS, HELEN

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178125303X ISBN 13: 9781781253038

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2016

Synopsis

Shot down on his first RAF mission, James Hunter spends his war in a German prison camp. The other captive soldiers busy themselves planning their escapes, but James dedicates himself to a detailed study of the redstarts nesting just beyond the camp boundaries - a project that gives him something to live for and earns him an unusual ally in the Kommandant in charge of the camp.

Rose, James's young wife, is spending her war in a cottage on the lip of Ashdown Forest in Sussex, with her dog Harris for company. She'd hardly known James before he went away and can barely engage with his letters, which talk of nothing but birds. Now she has fallen in love with someone else - Toby, a young pilot home on sick leave. They meet secretly at night.

Then James's brusque sister Enid is bombed out of her flat in London and comes to live in Rose's tiny cottage. Little more than strangers, both women are guarded, and Rose tries to conceal her affair from Enid. But later both look back on this strange interlude as one of their happiest.
Beautifully written and full of moments of hope, The Evening Chorus is a stirring story about love and the natural world, set against the backdrop of the Second World War.

About this title

Review

A poised, lyrical novel about the griefs of war, written with poetic intensity of observation (Helen Dunmore)

Poignantly explores the sorrows of war and consolations of nature ... A story of heartbreak and hope, it unfolds against a mesmerizingly described natural world. (Mail on Sunday 2015-05-10)

The Evening Chorus serenades people brutally marked by war yet enduring to live the tiny pleasures of another day. With her trademark prose Humphreys convinces us of the birdlike strength of the powerless. (Emma Donoghue)

In The Evening Chorus the interventions of war, and the resulting human tragedies, play out against a natural world at once remote, alien and ultimately redemptive. The novel has a crystalline quality about it - it's clear and complex and self-contained. It sparkles. (Jo Baker, author of Longbourn)

If there's a writer of English prose with a more profound connection to the natural world and to the subtleties of human love and sorrow than Helen Humphreys, I don't know who it is. The Evening Chorus is rich with her particular gift for symphonic cadences and beautiful imagery that moves a story forward with the momentum of a big train gathering speed. This riveting novel is a song. Listen. (Richard Bausch, author of The Last Good Time, the forthcoming Before, During, After and others)

Humphreys has a gift for complex characterization, which she renders in a few terse strokes. (The Boston Globe)

Humphreys has an impeccable command of imagery, and her prose finds strength in its subtlety. (Publishers Weekly)

A heartbreaking yet redemptive story about loss and survival surrounding a British prisoner of war during World War II and the wife he barely got to know before his capture ... Humphreys deserves more recognition for the emotional intensity and evocative lyricism of her seemingly straightforward prose and for her ability to quietly squirrel her way into the reader's heart. (Kirkus 2014-12-08)

A lyrical narrative about loss, love and the natural world. (Matilda Bathurst Country Life 2015-03-17)

A lyrical novel about war and the natural world and their effects on human beings. Beautifully written, the story it tells about the secrets within relationships, some expected, others surprising, makes this novel a quiet pleasure. (Diva 2015-06-01)

Book Description

A story of four lives torn apart by war, falling in and out of love, and the unlikely moments that come to define a life - now available in paperback

About this edition

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 178125303X
• ISBN 13: 9781781253038
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304