Sally Lunton has led a bohemian lifestyle in Paris, but now at 31 she returns to Little Crampton disillusioned, no job, no money and no hopes for the future except a safe, if loveless, marriage.. Little Crampton has its complement of “typical” villagers – the pompous bank manager, the local gossip, the ageing parson – but this is spring 1915, and the young men are away fighting and dying in the Great War. Farms and businesses are struggling to exist, families are grieving and there are not many marriage prospects for a spirited, worldly young woman. Sally's story is told with a mixture of wry humour, cynical observation and bitter anti-war sentiments that make this novel an interesting, emotional but never sentimental view of "English village life". (Summary by Anne Fletcher )

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