Evacuees

Stories and films set in stately homes continue to fascinate us, and Lissa Evans’s latest novel is likely to increase our appetite. It is 1945, and Dimperley Manor, the large, dilapidated home of the Vere-Thissetts near Aylesbury, has been almost emptied of its wartime evacuees. Only the widowed Zena Baxter (who adores Dimperley) and her small daughter remain, and the place has become a millstone round the neck of the heir, Valentine. The new baronet is expected to marry a rich bride to save his ancestral home. The nation, battered and bloodied, has just voted overwhelmingly for Labour. Is it a new dawn or a disaster? All this might seem

Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts, white space. The past interrupts the present, which in turn tugs at the future. It begins and ends in a car — a couple ‘side by side, in motion with a change of view’ – and all the while the reader too is in a state of flux, unsettled. That’s a state Sudjic’s protagonist, Anya, is familiar with. Along with other unaccompanied children, she was evacuated from Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. Sent to live with her aunt in Glasgow, she’s been searching for a sense of belonging ever since.