I’ve always enjoyed this author through her sailing yarns, her crime and now an historical novel. The jealousies, hardship and mistrust of the men returning from war and the attitudes, particularly between the sexes, are beautifully handled. The historical detail is fascinating, I learned a lot about the Polish army. The whole thing builds in an eerie tale of suspicion. I loved it.
It is 1946, and the eve of the harshest winter for a hundred years. Servicemen are pouring home from the war to a land beset by stringent food and job shortages, and a desperate housing crisis. As anti-Polish refugee propaganda reaches its height, Wladyslaw Malinowski, a young veteran of Monte Cassino, now stranded in a resettlement camp on the Somerset Levels, attempts to start a new life on a withy farm in the middle of the wetlands. His taskmaster is Billy Greer, newly demobbed, and itching to escape to a job in London. Stella, the local schoolteacher, has been waiting for the return of Lyndon Hanley, a hero of the Burma Campaign. But Lyndon is troubled, elusive, and ultimately unresponsive. When he goes away again, she finds herself falling for the beguiling and irrepressible Wladyslaw. As the country is brought to its knees by blizzards and coal shortages, people start to go hungry and attitudes harden. Then a death occurs on the wetlands, and it seems Wladyslaw, the outsider, will be held responsible. Homeland is Clare Francis's finest achievement.
Clare Francis is the author of eight international bestsellers, Night Sky, Red Crystal, Wolf Winter, Requiem, Deceit, Betrayal, A Dark Devotion and Keep Me Close. She has also written three non-fiction books about her voyages across the oceans of the world.
