Oh dear… ‘Archie’ looks pretty forbidding in this photo. Another family member: in this case, Father Harold Adams, my great-grandfather on the other side of my family. He was the father of the woman Bobby married.
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Have you ever been asked to introduce yourself in a group, coming up with a ‘fun fact’ about yourself that will be easy for others to remember? When that happens to me I enjoy telling the story of Father Harold. You can probably tell from the picture that he was an Anglo-Catholic clergyman. In truth, he was so far ‘up the candle’, as they say, that he called all five of his children ‘Mary’ in honour of the mother of our Lord. Including his son. (I also have a precious photograph of the five Marys, with their mother. All six look remarkably serene in the circumstances.)
 
Beyond that, I don’t know much about Father Harold. But his picture is inspiration for Father Archie, who features in The Restless Wave.  Archie is the vicar under whose tutelage Edward serves his curacy in Oxford. He’s hard-working, faithful to his calling and passionately committed to serving the poor of his parish.
 
I suspect Archie, like Harold, could be pretty forbidding at times. Edward is certainly a little in awe of him. But I’m just as sure that his austere exterior masks a heart of gold.

I’m someone who reads voraciously and widely. I’m always glad of recommendations, but I confess I also enjoy picking up books in charity shops. It’s a great way of discovering new authors and reading books that might never have come your way.
 
Having said that, Louis de Bernières is hardly unknown. But I’ll admit I somehow missed publication of The Dust that Falls from Dreams, which came out a few years ago. I read it over a cold January holiday curled up in front of the fire under a rug because I wasn’t feeling well. And I loved it.
 
The story is broadly about the impact of the First World War on the McCosh family. Rosie and her three sisters grow up in an eccentric household in Kent. Their neighbours are the Pitt boys on one side, and the Pendennis boys on the other. Their whole world changes, of course, when the War comes. The War has devastating consequences for each member of the family, and the effects are long lasting.
 
The book is a satisfying wodge – 500 pages plus – and has the feel of an epic, sweeping saga. It’s told from multiple viewpoints; a mix of narrative, letters and reportage. Because the chapters are short, it’s always tempting to read just one more section. In short, it’s a rich feast of a novel full of flavour.
 
The horrors of the trenches are often told, but somehow de Bernières manages to tell the story in a way that is vivid and fresh. Alongside the horror, we encounter the exhilaration of flying and the comradeship. The women left behind have their own struggles as they miss their loved ones, and find their own roles to play on the Home Front. Sadness and absurdity sit side by side as the story evolves. Central to the plot is a love story: a woman who can’t let go of her first love, and whose life becomes defined by loss.
 
There is excitement and horror and derring-do, and big themes, too. Love and death, obviously, but also religion. Rosie is a devout Anglo Catholic, while another character is a military chaplain. Class and gender politics enter in, as well, as all the societal rules change for the sisters and their household servants.
 
I won’t say too much about what happens, for fear of spoilers. Suffice it to say that the characters are real enough to be loveable and infuriating all at once. And I was so caught up in their world that I went straight out and bought the next book in the series (So Much of Life Left Over) because I really cared about what happened next in the lives of the central characters.
 
Another recent discovery addressing the same period of history is Dorothy Canfield’s The Deepening Stream. This book was published in 1930 – when of course the First World War was a vivid memory – and was a present to me from a friend. To my shame, I’d never heard of the author (also known as Dorothy Canfield Fisher) but she was a bestselling American writer in the early twentieth century. She was also an educational reformer and social activist; Eleanor Roosevelt named her one of the ten most influential women in the US. The Deepening Stream is semi-autobiographical, and culminates in an account of living through the First World War in Paris. I found it completely compelling. If you’re interested in reading it, you may struggle to find a copy in print. But I’d say it is well worth the search.

Like many readers, I was sad to hear of the death of the poet and novelist Helen Dunmore this summer. I was a huge fan, ever since in the very first book group I ever belonged to, I was introduced to her beautiful first novel Zennor in Darkness. Her descriptions, in particular, are utterly captivating - her ability to paint a picture so physical you can almost touch it quite remarkable.

Over the years I have read a number of her books, but not all of them. I dimly remember being mildly disappointed by one, a decade or so ago. (Almost certainly this was more about me than the quality of the novel. Sometimes a book disappoints at a particular moment for no reason other than it not being the right choice at the time.)  

But this summer I picked up the remarkable Counting the Stars which is all about the Roman poet Catullus. I happened upon it in a charity shop; and the sheer pleasure of reading it reminded me what I was missing by allowing her work to fall off my radar. I quickly followed it with Mourning Ruby and Exposure.

The last of the three was probably my favourite. Helen Dunmore wrote with such skill, such panache that her work leaves the reader breathless (and the author green with jealousy). At one level, her novels have a silky smooth surface, they are so readable. Yet it would be wrong to think that there is anything superficial going on. Scratch the surface and you find a tightly wrought plot, immaculate historical research, and complex characters who linger long after you've reached the end of the story.

RIP Helen Dunmore. You will be much missed by your legions of admirers.