In this fabulous new book from the author of The English Patient a young man, Nathaniel Williams, tries to piece together the puzzle of his childhood. In particular he remembers the year after the war when his parents left he and his sister in the care of a friend. The children were told it was their father’s work that necessitated the absence, but they later discovered differently. In his twenties Nathaniel works for British Intelligence and uses the time to investigate what his mother, in particular, got up to during and after the war.
Warlight is a bit like a spy novel where eighty percent of the clues have been removed. It is only just as Nathaniel slots together a piece of the puzzle that you realize it even is a piece. An anecdote from early on in the narrative suddenly takes on a greater meaning two hundred pages later. Nathaniel knows, as does the reader, that memory is a tricky thing - and childhood memories even more so. But he also knows that the events of that year were not as they seemed, and he is determined to make some sense of them.
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