Clara grew up in a house made ‘for Christmases and summers’. Her future husband Hal is from distinguished military stock. In the heat and brutality of the Cyprus Emergency, the young couple’s pure love for one another – his admiration of her; her vow to be brave for him – is painfully tested. In her second novel (The Outcast was an acclaimed debut), Sadie Jones pulls no punches in her description of the savagely unsophisticated island war. An exceptional book that shudders with the weight of human responsibility.
Hal Treherne is a soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. Impatient to see action, his other commitment in life is to his beloved wife, Clara, and when Hal is transferred to Cyprus she and their twin daughters join him. But the island is in the heat of the emergency; the British are defending the colony against Cypriots - schoolboys and armed guerillas alike - battling for union with Greece. Clara shares Hal's sense of duty and honour; she knows she must settle down, make the best of things, smile. But action changes Hal, and the atrocities he is drawn into take him not only further from Clara but himself, too; a betrayal that is only the first step down a dark path. Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
