In this expansive novel, folks meander into the marshes or bluffs or to London and wander back after several pages. However, one must read closely to follow all the weaving and bobbing of the many major and minor characters who show up in Rye. It’s a wonderful bit of Austen-inspired romance to watch as Beatrice and Hugh sort out for whom they are each truly best-suited in life. Upon meeting Beatrice at the train station, Hugh muses that his Aunt Agatha, one of the town’s leading matrons, would have preferred that Beatrice were much plainer. The female characters, most notably newcomer to town Beatrice Nash, hired by the more progressive elements of the local school board to teach schoolboys Latin, prod the male characters forward not toward war (though that looms over the novel), but toward adulthood and reckoning.īeatrice is too young, attractive, and intelligent (she even has literary aspirations) for some to believe her a proper teacher. As Hugh reflects on his childhood in the opening pages: “Small boys, he now knew, were inveterate fraudsters and begged, pleaded, and cajoled for added rights and treats with innocent eyes and black hearts.” This is a story of English boys becoming men, most notably the brilliant medical student Hugh Grange and his artistic cousin Daniel Bookham, and the women who nudge them on. This sophomore novel from the author of the bestselling Major Pettigrew’s Last Standbrings us back to the moment before the world changed forever - before the onset of the First World War in 1914 - in the country town of Rye near the high Sussex bluffs. If you’re mourning the end of “Downton Abbey” as I am, it’s time for the witty and wise The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson.

The last summer before the war