In a narrative as mysterious as memory itself - at once both shadowed and luminous - Warlight is a vivid, thrilling novel of violence and love, intrigue and desire. It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz and years of war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth.
They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends- men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all he didn't know or understand in that time, and it is this journey - through reality, recollection, and imagination - that is told in this magnificent novel.
Barb takes care of the web orders here at Boffins, and is your contact for book club enquiries. She spends all her spare time curled up on the couch reading and for the last several years has reviewed books on the Afternoon Program on ABC radio Perth.
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.
