A Bitter Harvest

1919. The Great War is over and an armistice agreed but peace is not a given. England, riven by grief and loss, attacked by the Spanish Flu, with its younger generation of men killed, traumatised or wounded, is adjusting to a changed world. The slaughter of the Great War is over, but the Roaring Twenties are still far away. A Bitter Harvest explores the experience of Isobel and Rose Richmond and their cousin Ariadne who are confronted with the reality that only a fraction of their generation will ever marry and have children. The narrative shifts between the English countryside, the Peace Conference in Paris and the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow, with a cast of characters that includes an aged Thomas Hardy and Lloyd George at the height of his powers. When Julian Belmore, an Irishman who has come through the war unscathed arrives in Dorset he brings with him an Irish Nationalist past and emotional turmoil that sets off a chain of events culminating in tragedy. A Bitter Harvest is the first volume in a sequence of novels that will follow the events of the inter-war years and the lives of a unique generation.


Genre: Historical

"This is more than a brilliant gem of historical fiction. It illuminates bitter truths we tend to forget, but it also makes one understand better the tragedies of human frailty." - Theodore Zeldin