The Letters

Lily Harper was raised, like everyone in Hurst Green, to know exactly who the enemy was. She has heard him on the wireless. She has heard his engines in the dark over the Weald.

Then, in February 1941, a German fighter comes down in the ploughing beyond the long meadow, and the war she has only heard about is lying wounded in her own fields.

The pilot holds out his pistol to her, butt first.

The enemy she was raised to fear has a face, and a name, and a quiet decency that unsettles everything she believed. By morning he is gone. What he leaves behind is a square of paper with an address in pencil, and Lily hides it under the forms in the dresser drawer.

She is not allowed to write to him.

In a village where a single careless word can ruin a life, that ought to be the end of it. The love story in The Shadows of War runs quietly, through ordinary days: the milking, the harvest, the blackout, the long evenings by the wireless. It is never the only thing happening. It is the thing nobody else can know.

The enemy she was raised to fear has a face, and a name.

What Lily does with that, in a war that asks everyone to choose a side, is for the book to tell.