Orange New Writers

1920. The Great War has been over for two years, and it has left a very different world from the Edwardian certainties of 1914.

Following the death of his wife and baby and his experiences on the Western Front, Laurence Bartram has become something of a recluse. Yet death and the aftermath of the conflict continue to cast a pall over peacetime England, and when a young woman he once knew persuades him to look into events that apparently led her brother, John Emmett, to kill himself, Laurence is forced to revisit the darkest parts of the war. As Laurence unravels the connections between Captain Emmett’s suicide, a group of war poets, a bitter regimental feud and a hidden love affair, more disquieting deaths are exposed. Even at the moment Laurence begins to live again, it dawns on him that nothing is as it seems, and that even those closest to him have their secrets...

Elizabeth Speller studied Classics at university. She is a prize-winning poet, and has written three non-fiction books, including her memoir SUNLIGHT IN THE GARDEN (Granta).

Elizabeth Speller had children while living in Cold War Berlin. Later she went to Lucy Cavendish College at Cambridge University to read Classics as a mature student and single mother, and then did a post-graduate degree in Ancient History. She has written for publications including The Independent, Big Issue and Vogue has run poetry workshops and was herself shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2009. She lives in a Cotswold valley, where she works in a restored shepherd’s hut, and in a tiny cottage, with eleven olive trees, on the Greek island of Paxos. She is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Warwick and is working on her third novel.