City of Belmont - Ruth Faulkner Public Library

Home fires, Elizabeth Day

Home fires

Elizabeth Day

Charnwood

Max Weston, twenty-one and a newly-promoted lance corporal, leaves home for his first posting in Eastern Africa. He never comes back. His parents Caroline and Andrew are devastated by the death of their only child and, as Caroline drifts on her private ocean of grief, the moorings of their marriage come loose. The silence is broken by the arrival of Andrew's mother Elsa, who can no longer look after herself. Caroline has never felt good enough for Elsa. Now, suddenly, she has the upper hand... As Elsa lies, marooned and disorientated, in the spare room, the past unspools in her mind, throwing up fragments of her childhood under the shadow of her father, a soldier who came back from the Great War a different man