Description

A Sunday Times historical fiction book of the year

‘A tender portrait of wartime youth’?Guardian

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Frida is a twelve-year-old evacuee from the East End, sent to stay with a farming family deep in the lonely landscape of the Fens.

Philip is an artist and a conscientious objector, living in a remote lighthouse on the shores of the Wash.

Amid the wild beauty of the wetlands, as the world is consumed by war, they form a friendship that will change the course of both their lives.

Publisher Review

'Beautifully-written, and highly evocative of the remote Lincolnshire landscape, the Second World War and the two people whose loneliness brings them together for a life-changing time... Full of quiet drama and sorrow at loss, cruelty and mortality.' - Amanda Craig 'Compelling and beautifully intimate. A classic piece of storytelling' - Toby Litt 'A haunting and lyrical novel about loneliness and the compensations of the natural world, art and unlikely friendships' - Maggie Brookes 'Precise in its historical detail and admirable in its evocation of the large skies and isolation of its setting, this is a moving study of an unlikely friendship and the healing power of the natural world' - Sunday Times, Best Historical Fiction 'A tender portrait of wartime youth [with] an elegiac, gentle quality, evoking the Wash as "a place between somewhere and nowhere, one of the last wildernesses in England". A novel of tender quiet voices, and grace' - Guardian