These Days by Lucy Caldwell
Synopsis
Two sisters, four nights, one city.
April, 1941. Belfast has escaped the worst of the war - so far. Over the next two months, its going to be destroyed from above, so that people will say, in horror, My God, Belfast is finished. Many wont make it through, and no one who does will remain unchanged.
Following the lives of sisters Emma and Audrey - one engaged to be married, the other in a secret relationship with another woman - as they try to survive the horrors of the four nights of bombing which were the Belfast Blitz, These Days is a timeless and heart-breaking novel about living under duress, about family, and about how we try to stay.
Reviews
'A novel of enormous heart; full of luminous passages of prose, this tale of the Belfast blitz is breathtakingly good.' Observer
'Meticulously researched, perfectly imagined, full of compassion and emotional truth.' Clare Chambers
'Elegant and precise, I loved it. The vivid interiority Caldwell brings to the characters, particularly the three main women, is so impressive. I cared passionately about all of them. These Days is a gem of a novel.' Marian Keyes
'Adroit, precise storytelling, atmospheric and satisfying; These Days is a novel of real substance.' Hilary Mantel
'Anyone who read Lucy Caldwell's Intimacies will know what a beautiful writer she is and These Days, her first novel in a decade, is really something special ... So vividly evoked, this brought what life must have been like on the Home Front to life for me like nothing I've read before.' Bookseller
'What a visceral, powerful, authentic novel! It's hard to believe Lucy Caldwell didn't actually live through the Belfast Blitz, it's so accurately depicted. I felt I was there with the bombs, the blood, the chaos, the fear, and the resilience.' Tracy Chevalier