Liardet describes beautifully the almost animal quality of that feeling, called up by the smell of a child’s neck, the curve of a chubby arm, even an outgrown dress.

This is a book suffused with parental affection: fierce, physical and almost inexpressibly tender.

“We began to mill barley flour along with the wheat, and then we had to mix potato flour with the barley, and Pamela was still with us.” Although largely preoccupied with the war years, the novel ends in 2010, and as well as being a deft social history, it is a love story – that of the love Ellen discovers in herself for the little girl and its relationship to her own poverty-stricken childhood in the 1920s and 30s how it changes them both, and what it costs. The party includes a small, unaccompanied child, Pamela, whom Ellen volunteers to look after until her parents can be found, but as the war progresses the days turn to years. It is 1940 and a busload of bombed-out civilians from Southampton has arrived in the village of Upton, where Ellen Parr and her much older husband Selwyn, a miller with whom she has what’s described as a mariage blanc, are helping to find them beds for the night. The writing is often dazzling – a child’s voice is “clear, piping, like a twig peeled of its bark” – and this, too, lifts what might have been a sentimental story into different territory altogether. From the off, Frances Liardet’s second novel, published 25 years after her first, distances itself from nostalgia and insists on its own terms. Beyond distance, beyond time, beyond life itself.D omestic stories of women’s lives in wartime are common in genre publishing but rarer in literary fiction.

Spanning the sweep of the 20th century, We Must Be Brave explores the fierce love that we feel for our children and the power of that love to endure. But with the end of the fighting comes the realization that Pamela was never theirs to keep. As the war rages on, love grows where it was least expected, surprising them all. Little Pamela, it seems, is entirely alone.Įllen has always believed she does not want children, but when she takes Pamela into her home, the child cracks open the past Ellen thought she had escaped and the future she and her husband, Selwyn, had dreamed for themselves. In Upton village, amid the chaos, newly married Ellen Parr finds a girl asleep, unclaimed at the back of an empty bus. As German bombs fall on Southampton, England, during World War II, the city's residents flee to the surrounding villages. The child who changed everything.ĭecember 1940. Beyond distance, beyond time, beyond life itself.Ī woman. 'A powerful story that proves how love itself requires courage.' (Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing )

We must be brave frances liardet