Hampshire, 1916: Alice traces her hand over the cold glass of the window as the pale morning light slips into the empty room.
The pain of loss is worse than a physical one. Reminders of Edmund are all around her. The coldness of the sheet on the other half of the bed. The unrelenting silence in the cottage when her stepdaughter Lottie is tucked up asleep at the end of another day.
How did Alice ever imagine she could run their workshop in Edmund’s absence? Keeping up with their stained-glass commissions takes every ounce of her strength, and as Lottie becomes more withdrawn, Alice worries desperately about how best to care for the troubled girl.
Alice takes comfort from renewed closeness with her brother Victor, whose injuries prevent him from re-joining the fight, and who is enmeshed in undercover work for the Ministry of Munitions.
She must go on, for Lottie, for Edmund, and for the life as artists they’ve built together.
But with the news from the Front more desperate every day, she knows that the chance that she’ll ever see her husband again is slipping away from her.
And then the telegram arrives…
The Artist’s War by Clare Flynn is published on 20 August, 2024. It’s the third in her Hearts of Glass series.
There’s much more historical fiction in our round-up of over 180 books coming out this year.
