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?
,
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.

Guest review by Jane Rogers: THE MATCHBOX GIRL by Alice Jolly

 

"As with all the best historical fiction, Jolly has written a novel which is only too relevant to our times ... "

Jane Rogers has written ten novels, including The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Man-Booker longlisted and winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award 2012. Other works include Mr Wroe's Virgins (which she dramatised as a BBC drama series), and Promised Lands (Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award). Jane also writes short stories, radio drama and adaptations, and has taught writing to a wide range of students.

Her latest collection of climate-themed short stories, Fire-Ready, is out now in paperback; five of the stories were read on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime in March 2026. For a review by Lesley Glaister, and a Q&A with Jane, see below. For more information, see Jane's website.

This is an extraordinarily ambitious novel, set in Vienna before and during World War 2, and based on real events.

In Vienna in 1934 there’s a progressive residential centre for children with learning difficulties, children who today would be termed neurodivergent. The director is kindly, humane scientist Dr A (the real life Asperger). Our heroine and narrator, Adelheid, is a mute 12 year old inpatient. She has an unusual mind, the kind of mind Dr A is researching in order to better understand and teach children like her.

Instead of speaking, Adelheid writes things down; her passion for the truth, her intelligence, and her eagle-eyed attention to detail, make her a valuable assistant to Dr A, and over time she progresses from patient to member of staff. These qualities also make her a brilliantly unbiassed chronicler of the Nazis’ growing power and influence over Viennese life. Initially, like everyone else, she’s thrilled by the pomp and pageantry, the marching and singing.

But gradually she notices that certain staff members are disappearing – fleeing to America, or simply vanishing overnight. Jewish people. She observes that Dr A is being put under increasing pressure to turn his patients into ‘useful’ citizens. And that those who are unlikely to ever be ‘useful’ are being transferred to the sinister Am Spiegelgrund, a new children’s hospital where visitors are not permitted, and children are never heard of again.

This is a truly heart-breaking coming of age story, as naïve, truth-seeking Adelheid gradually comes to understand not only the extent of Nazi wickedness, but also to recognise the necessity – for people like Dr A – of playing along with it, in order to retain any agency at all. It is a bitterly accurate portrayal of the way in which fascist thinking can creep into people’s lives, and how, without in any way subscribing to antisemitism or child euthanasia, bystanders can become complicit. As with all the best historical fiction, Jolly has written a novel which is only too relevant to our times.

The subject matter is tragic, but mercifully this novel is not only uplifting, but often comic, thanks to Adelheid’s eccentric and original narrating voice. Here’s a taster:

‘I begin this Story on the day of 25 July 1934, a moment well known in the History of my Country of Austria. Personally, I do not remember that Day for the same reasons as do others. The World is so Extremely Busy, many things Happening all at once. (Adelheid – Do not go off down a Tram Track. Stick to the Facts.) The point is that on this day here is Adelheid Brunner (twelve years old) and she is arriving at the World-Famous Weiner Kinderklinik or Vienna Children’s Hospital. She has in her pocket Franz Joseph, who is named after a Habsburg Emperor, but is a Rat.’

The Matchbox Girl is published by Bloomsbury.

Jane Rogers' Fire-Ready reviewed by Lesley Glaister.

A Q&A with Jane about Fire-Ready.