Why am I passionate about this?
I am the prize-winning author of sixteen novels, most recently Little Egypt, The Squeeze, and Blasted Things. I teach creative writing at the University of St Andrews. I live in Edinburgh and am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. I’m a novelist and student of human nature. I love to work out what motivates people, how and why they make choices, their coping mechanisms, and how they act under pressure. Before I begin a novel set in the past, I read as much fiction written at the time as I can find, as well as autobiography and history. In this way, I attempt to truffle down into the actions and impulses of individuals, both performative and deeply interior, that characterise the spirit of the era that I’m writing.
Lesley's book list on finding a new normal after World War I
Why did Lesley love this book?
Chris, a shell-shocked soldier who suffers from amnesia, returns from the front expecting life to be as he remembered. But he’s lost fifteen years of his memory and doesn’t recognise his wife Kitty, is horrified by how his cousin Jenny has aged, and longs only for Margaret, the girl he loved all those years ago. Despairing for his sanity, Kitty and Jenny summon Margaret, sure he’ll come to his senses when he sees her, only to find that he still adores her, dowdy, careworn, and poor as she is. The war is only glancingly mentioned here but its loss and damage aches between the lines. Told by Jenny, who loves Chris but starts to see Kitty in a new light, the dreadful snobbishness of the times is laid clear. The Return of the Soldier is a brief novel, romantic and witty, moving and bitter – I devoured it in one…
1 author picked The Return of the Soldier as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
A shell-shocked officer returns from the chaos of World War I to the tranquility of his stately English home — leaving his memory of the preceding 15 years amid the muddy trenches at the front lines. Anxiously awaiting the soldier's return are the three women who love him best: the perceptive cousin who narrates his story, the beautiful wife he fails to recognize, and the tender first love of his youth.
This remarkable war novel, Rebecca West's first work of fiction, depicts neither battles nor battlefields. Originally published in 1918, it takes a searching look at the far-reaching effects of…