Guest feature by Alice Jolly: WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE? - a round-up

 

"Women write about war in a way which is different from the approach generally taken by men and their stories of collaboration often have a painful authenticity ..."

Alice Jolly’s most recent novel The Matchbox Girl (Bloomsbury, 2025) won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Her novel Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile was runner up for the £30,000 Rathbones Folio Prize and she has also won the Pen Ackerley Prize, the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize and an O. Henry Award (20 best short stories in the US). She taught creative writing at Oxford University for sixteen years and reviews for The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. 

The English have always been obsessed by the Second World War and why not? After all, we won and they lost. But is it really that simple? As we watch the rise of the far right in America, it is suddenly not so easy to accept a simplistic version of the past.

All around us, people are increasingly having to ask themselves the questions which haunted Europe in the 1930s and 40s. Could I make I make personal sacrifices to protect democracy and diversity? What if I had to choose between speaking the truth and protecting the safety of my family?
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These are questions which I tried to unravel in my recent novel The Matchbox Girl, but these same issues have also recently been tackled by other excellent writers. Women write about war in a way which is different from the approach generally taken by men and their stories of collaboration often have a painful authenticity.

So here are recommendations of four exceptional books (three novels and a memoir) which take a fearless approach to questions of denial and complicity.

Once the Deed is Done by Rachel Seiffert, Virago 2025

Rachel Seiffert has written three novels all of which focus on the German experience of the Second World War and its aftermath. Her most recent book (shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize) is centred on a small town in Germany during and after the war. It is a novel of diffuse viewpoints, deftly steering the reader in and out of the lives of a huge range of characters but centring, in particular, on a camp for displaced people and the English Red Cross volunteer who is in charge. A graceful, quiet, subtle novel about a nation facing up to appalling mistakes and misdeeds, it is entirely immersive and quietly powerful. I particularly loved the final sections.

The Mare by Angharad Hampshire, Hamish Hamilton, forthcoming in August 2026

This is Angharad Hampshire's first novel but it is written with such fluency and confidence that you would never know. She tells the story of Ryan and Hermine (both of whom actually existed). They are living in the suburbs of New York in the 1960s when a journalist from the New York Times knocks on the door and accuses Hermine of having been a concentration camp guard. Hampshire writes this story in alternating first person voices switching from the thoughts of Hermine to those of Ryan. It should be the case that we soon hate Hermine – and we do – and yet strangely we cannot entirely dismiss her. What did she do? And is there any truth is her assertion that she is being made a scapegoat for a wider system? Gripping, dark and disturbing, this is a novel which helps us understand how an initially harmless person is drawn into acts of absolute evil.

33 Place Brugmann by Alice Austen, Bloomsbury 2025

I have to confess that I loved Alice Austen’s novel partly for very personal reasons. It is set in Brussels where I lived for sixteen years, and it is focused on a particular square which is just round the corner from where I used to live. What struck me as I read the novel was that, despite knowing Brussels so well, I have never really had any discussions with Belgians about their city’s wartime history. This is hardly surprising because (as for many occupied countries) facing the past is simply too difficult. Austen, as an American, gives voice to the city’s hidden pain. Her novel is quiet, beautifully written and utterly absorbing. Full of memorable characters and devastating scenes, it is a master class in what the best of historical fiction can achieve.

In My Grandfather’s Shadow by Angela Findlay, Bantam 2022

Angela Findlay’s extraordinary memoir tells the story of her German grandfather who was a General on the Eastern front in the second world war. Angela sets out to find out the truth about who he was and what he did – and also how his hidden legacy has impacted her own life. She writes with endless curiosity about the long shadow of war and the impact of intergenerational trauma, asking – how do comprehend the incomprehensible, love the unlovable, forgive the unforgiveable?

Alice's The Matchbox Girl is reviewed here by Jane Rogers.