Product Description

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 'Deeply humane and acutely truthful' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times After the upheavals of the Second World War, the Richardson family -- Sam, Ellen and their young son Joe -- settle back to working-class life in the Cumbrian town of Wigton. Yet for them, as for so many, life will never be the same again. As the old order begins to be challenged and new vistas open, Sam and Ellen forge their future together with differing needs and desires - and conflicting expectations of Joe, who grows up with his own demons to confront. 'It is as if these were the novels he was always waiting to write...He catches brilliantly the volatility of emotions -- how happiness can curdle, anger flare, guilt build into terrror.' Nicci Gerrard, Observer 'A novel about being alive, the kind of slice-of-life novel that everyone feels they have inside them but few could write' Brandon Robshaw, Independent on Sunday 'This sequel to The Soldier's Return -- widely acclaimed as Melvyn Bragg's best novel -- is every bit as convincing and enjoyable ...This seems likely to become not only an outstandingly good series but one of the finest and most authentic records of the changes in English society, life and manners since the Second World War' Allan Massie, Scotsman 'Shot through with blazing integrity and authenticity' Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #433659 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-21
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 7.80" h x 1.10" w x 5.00" l, .66 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
Melvyn Bragg's A Son of War begins where A Soldier's Return ended. The previous novel--a moving account of the struggles, social and psychological, faced by a Burma veteran returning to Cumbrian hometown life with his wife and six-year-old son--picked up the WH Smith 1999 Literary Award. But whereas A Soldier's Return was largely Sam's story, Bragg here gives equal weight to Ellen, with her wide-eyed adoration for a long-lost brother and her high hopes of life on the new edge-of-town estate, cruelly foiled by Sam's dreams of owning a pub. But central is the "son of war", the endearing Joe, torn between being "Sam's lad" and "Ellen's boy", the fledgling boxer or the budding pianist.

Bragg evokes well the petty yet momentous discoveries of a young boy, equally fixated on Disney's Snow White and girls doing handstands. While this is very much the personal story of one family, with heavy hints of autobiography, it's also the picture of Britain emerging from the war, throwing off Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby--a new Britain of rationing, the Big Freeze and strikes, talk of nuclear war, socialism, Joe Louis versus Jersey Joe Walcott. Once again, Bragg has succeeded in conjuring an epoch of unprecedented change, and capturing both its joys and its miseries: a worthy successor to The Soldier's Return -- Alan Stewart

From Publishers Weekly
This is the second volume of a trilogy that began with The Soldier's Return, about a family in a little town in Cumbria, in the northwest of England, in the years following WWII; the trilogy has been heralded in Bragg's native Britain as his masterwork. It is certainly, in its first two volumes, a highly impressive achievement, spinning an utterly convincing tale of small lives that embrace large issues of faith, courage, endurance and aspiration. Sam Richardson, a thoughtful working man whose life has been enlarged by his war experience in Burma, continues to find it difficult to settle back into Wigton, and eventually finds independence in taking over an old pub and bringing it back to life. This is hard on his wife, Ellen, whose dream of a more intimate home has to be given up; she has to realize, too, that her half-brother Colin, who suddenly surfaces with news of her cherished but mysterious father but is shifty and evasive, is not the kind of man Sam can tolerate. And young Joe, their son, entering a painful adolescence beset by nameless fears, has to straddle the disparate worlds and demands of his mother and father, trying to be at once tough and tender. Bragg has a remarkable knack for entering into the hearts and minds of his characters, and his understanding of their milieu, still an almost feudal one in many respects even in the mid-20th century, is acute. This is an old-fashioned book in the best sense: sympathetic, leisurely, absorbing and warmly believable.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
"'Have you got a penny mister?' By now there was an awful turmoil inside him. He could not be seen crying, but he badly wanted to cry. SNOW WHITE would start....soon." Joe needed another penny to buy his movie ticket. So don't be fooled as I was by the martial title of this novel. This is a coming- of-age novel, too precious for some. Mark McGann presents the voices of children, full of hope, innocence, and longing. He also renders the women and men in the pubs. There are betrayals and disappointments in working-class England after the war. Some dreams are realized, others not. More tears are spilled than blood. B.H.C. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine