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.

Independent Bookseller Feature No.3: The Book Corner, Halifax. UNDER THE ROCK and THE GALLOWS POLE by Benjamin Myers

We opened The Book Corner in September 2017 with Bookworms, our dedicated children’s bookshop, next door. We are proud to have brought an independent bookshop back to Halifax and are located in the recently renovated Grade I listed Piece Hall, the only example in this country of the great eighteenth century northern cloth halls.

The shop is owned by Kate Claughan who also owns The Bookcase in Hebden Bridge. The team are avid readers and all-round book champions, passionate about delivering events that offer something extra for the local community whether it be a local author book signing, a poetry collection launch, a spoken word open-mic night, a regular YA book club or a good old-fashioned story-time for younger readers.

We are also delighted to partner Square Chapel Arts Centre supporting their various events for authors and poets including Hollie McNish, Roger McGough, Willy Russell and Stuart Maconie.

We have chosen to review two books by local author Benjamin Myers. Ben is an author, journalist and poet who has written seven books as well as many poems and short stories. His novel The Gallows Pole has just won the 2018 Walter Scott Prize and is our best-selling fiction title. Ben recently collaborated with ‘Yorkshire’s very own Wainwright’ and cartographer, Christopher Goddard, to create a Cragg Vale Coiners map, a sweeping walker’s guide to the locations featured in the novel. It is well worth a trek through the blustery bogs and banks to experience the incredible Calder Valley but always with a hip flask close at hand.

The Gallows Pole is a visceral re-telling of the Cragg Vale Coiners’ efforts to ‘clip’ the late 18th century England’s economy into devastation. Myers delivers a windswept tale of 1769 Northern England, diving head first into the murky world of pseudo King David Hartley and his gang of land-workers as they bully and spit their enterprising scheme across the Calder Valley. No man will stand in their way, but can they avoid the hangman’s noose? Deeply resonant for the modern reader, this is a vivid portrait of the working man and his uprising against the rich establishment. Myers has woven an unforgettable tale filled with landscape, poetry and Yorkshire vernacular that has you grasped by the throat long after the final page has been turned. A worthy winner of the 2018 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Under the Rock is the most beautifully written non fiction book. Reading it takes you on a journey into the West Yorkshire village of Mytholmroyd which is situated in the steep sided Calder valley. Scout Rock, is present as a constant companion. The author lives below it; his relationship to the rock is examined throughout the book. The rock has also affected others who live in the valley, most famously Ted Hughes. The observations on nature are glorious whilst not flinching from describing the raw and gritty side. The book is split into parts: Wood, Earth, Water, Rock. At the end of each part are poems which make you feel as if you accompanied the author on his walks around the valley. There is an extremely powerful sense of place. I was fully immersed in the landscape, the water, the woods, the rock. Lyrical, powerful, engaging, moving and fascinating. Highly recommended.

The Gallows Pole is published by Bluemoose Books and Under the Rock by Elliott & Thomson.

Review by Katie Ashwood and Louise Beere.

Guest review by Catherine Johnson: THE LONG SONG by Andrea Levy

Catherine Johnson has written many books for young readers, including her most recent, Blade and Bone, the continuing adventures of young surgeon and anatomist Ezra McAdam and his friends first encountered in Sawbones. Blade and Bone finds Ezra in Paris just as the terror begins. Another recent novel, The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo, was shortlisted for last year's YA prize. She also writes for TV, film and radio.

One book I return to again and again is Andrea Levy’s masterpiece The Long Song.

It’s not just the central narrative, which breaks your heart more than once, in several ways, it’s the way the different characters frame those narratives. It’s a writers’ book about stories and how we tell them depending on who we are talking to, about how some stories are just too painful to be told and about how changing those stories is sometimes the only power we have.

I cannot recommend this book enough.

It is set across the nineteenth century, mostly in Jamaica although Victorian Hornsey gets a look in. The story of Miss July, born into slavery, fathered by a white overseer, living through the upheaval of the Baptist Wars and eventually becoming free. A woman who gives up her son to a white couple for his own betterment.

In July’s old age, her son, Thomas, returns from his upbringing and education in London to set up a printing press in Kingston. July agrees to set down the story of her life. But as anyone in any family knows, there is always more than one story.

I can imagine you might think – Another slavery narrative! Save me from Twelve Years a Slave or another remake of Roots! And I will nod my head; I could not watch Roots again. But there are a million reasons why you should read this, not including the experience of a time so often overlooked, and histories that are ignored.

Due to limitations of space and time I will outline just two…

Firstly it’s hugely funny. July, our main narrator is very dry and very unreliable. The horrors of how she came to be and how she exists, often descend into a kind of farce. And after all isn’t it a ridiculous, unbelievable situation? People arbitrarily owning other people?

Secondly it’s the actual writing of it. The structure of a story framed within a story. Of how we all shape our own history in order to be able to live and in order not to hurt those we love.

As someone who has scraped a living from writing for the past twenty years it is fascinating to see how artless and clever the structure of this book is.

It was on the Booker shortlist in 2010 and won The Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.

The Long Song is published by Tinder Press.