When No Man’s Land is home

Countless writers and film-makers this year will be trying their hand at forcing us to wake up and smell the first world war.  How do they plant a fresh, haunting, horrifying image into our unwilling and saturated heads? We know it all: the trenches, the mud, the shell holes, the rats, the man plodding towards the house with the telegram, the local surnames repeated with different initials on the war memorial. All very much in the ‘too sad to think about’ department, particularly if you love Edwardian children’s stories and start contemplating What Happened to Oswald Later.

Helen Dunmore, an assured writer who in a previous novel has forced us to live through the siege of Leningrad with its freezing and starving babies, does not shirk from her task. She really does make us wake up and smell it: mainly the mud. The Lie is a mud-clagged, death-clagged, haunted book, written in the first person in the present tense, and I must say, it stays with you.