The House at Tyneford

From the opening lines, the reader understands that this will be a sad, sad story. Before the opening lines, in fact, with the prologue of sorts: "Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us have lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly. - notice pinned to the door of Tyneford Church by departing villagers."The opening lines tell the reader that the house has fallen to ruin, pockmarked by bullets and succumbing to them and ravages of time. All of this before we even meet our protagonist, Elise, a 19-year-old Austrian Jew on the brink of being separated from her family, sent to the safety of England to become a parlour maid. This, from a girl who has never drawn her own bath. We are prepared for tragedy from the outset but, just as Elise could not be prepared for her future, we are not prepared for the succession of tragedies contained within this book's pages.

The House at Tyneford is a haunting story, in no small part because the reader knows that, even if these characters have been created entirely by Natasha Solomons to exist in this fictional space, real people did live these horrors, or if not exactly these, than others which are similar - or worse. Ultimately, this is a story of resilience and survival and love. It is what people can do - and do to one another - when they are pushed beyond the limits of what seems possible. In that way, The House at Tyneford, shares much in common with Suite Française or Roses (Leila Meacham) or even Gone with the Wind - each defined by a woman whose life and love is irrevocably altered by war.

Even the author's note is tinged with tragedy. Tyneford, Solomons writes, is based on the ghost village of Tyneham which was requisitioned by the British army in December 1943. Every man, woman, and child was turned out, never to see their homes again. The shops and homes were used for target practice, then left to the vagaries of the wind and rain. The protagonist, too, was inspired by a living person: the author's great aunt who, like Elise, left the only life she had known to enter domestic service in English.

Four stars.