Tag Archives: Alison Macleod

Unexploded by Alison MacLeod

Posted by Kate W in Fiction and tagged with , , , , ,

“Bright-eyed young men, beautiful, foolish and frightened young men, were being blown to pieces – literally, she thought, to pieces – as she sat in her Wednesday-morning knitting circle making socks for feet that would be lost to amputations, and mittens for hands that would never cup a waist or a breast again.”

Would it be wrong to fill this review with Alison MacLeod’s extremely elegant words about wartime? Because I could. MacLeod writes beautifully about a topic that’s frightening, horrible and will never be forgotten.

“The world was back to front, helter-skelter – absurd. The Queen took lessons with a revolver after her morning tea. The Times urged golfers to keep a rifle in their golf bags. Old women were stockpiling garden forks and shears.”

Unexploded is set in 1940, during WWII. Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news of the expected enemy landing on the beaches of Brighton, England. Continue reading →

First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday – Unexploded by Alison Macleod

Posted by Kate W in Fiction and tagged with , , ,

unexploded-alison-macleod

What’s your NetGalley ‘effort level’? Until recently I made sure that I reviewed (in a timely manner) at least half of what I requested however that has slipped a little of late. I don’t want the nice people at NetGalley to stop sending things my way so I’m making a two-fold effort – request less and review more.  I have five ARCs in the TBR stack and next is Unexploded by Alison Macleod. Thought it would be a good one to share for First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday (as always, with thanks to Bibliophile by the Sea for hosting).

The story is set in 1940. Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news of the expected enemy landing on the beaches of Brighton.  The year brings tension and change. While Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, Evelyn struggles to fall in with the war effort and her thoughts become tinged with a mounting, indefinable desperation.  Then she meets Otto Gottlieb, a ‘degenerate’ German-Jewish painter and prisoner in her husband’s internment camp. As Europe crumbles, Evelyn’s and Otto’s mutual distrust slowly begins to change into something else, which will shatter the structures on which her life, her family and her community rest.

It begins – Continue reading →