Unexploded

Passions run high in Alison MacLeod's strikingly original novel of love and prejudice in wartime Brighton. This novel about a stagnant marriage set in wartime is a worthy contender for the Man Booker1940, Brighton. Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news of the expected enemy landing on the town beaches. The crisis passes – others lie ahead. Evelyn’s thoughts have become tinged with mounting, indefinable desperation. Then she meets Otto Gottlieb, a German-Jewish prisoner in the internment camp that her husband commands. As Europe crumbles, Evelyn's and Otto's mutual distrust slowly begins to change into something else. Love collides with fear, the power of art with the forces of war, and the lives of Evelyn, Otto and Geoffrey are changed irrevocably."MacLeod is stunningly good on the slow creep of mounting tension against the backdrop of the oppressive summer heat: "The weather needed to break. The war needed to break. The entire town seemed to live on short, staggering breaths." Not to mention knowing what's more powerfully left to the imagination, whether the day-to-day details of a floundering marriage, or Nazi cruelties indescribable. Unexploded is like a piece of finely wrought ironwork, uncommonly delicate but at the same time astonishingly strong and tensile; it's a novel of staggering elegance and beauty." - Lucy Scholes, The IndependentAlison MacLeod moved from her native Canada to England, supposedly for one year to read for an MA. Unexplored is set during the Second World War but was inspired by the ‘haunted atmosphere in London the day after the 2005 bombings’. Brighton, MacLeod’s English home, features large in the novel, not least because she discovered ‘there had been a rumour, apparently started on German radio, that Hitler would make the Brighton Pavilion his English HQ’. A novel of fine-tuned beauty, sharp insight and emotional subtlety – about a family in the shadow of WWII May, 1940. Brighton. Wartime. On Park Crescent, a sunlit and usually tranquil street, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news. The enemy is expected to land on the beaches of Brighton any day. It is a year of tension and change. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, while young Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton’s Royal Pavilion his English HQ. He spends hours with his friends imagining life in Brighton under Hitler’s rule. And as the rumours continue to fly and the days tick on, Evelyn struggles to fall in with the war effort and the constraints of her role in life, her thoughts becoming tinged with a mounting, indefinable desperation. Then she meets Otto Gottlieb, a ‘degenerate’ German-Jewish painter and prisoner in her husband’s internment camp. As Europe crumbles, Evelyn’s and Otto’s mutual distrust slowly begins to change into something else, which will shatter the structures on which her life, her family and her community rest. Love collides with fear, the power of art with the forces of war, and the lives of Evelyn, Otto, and Geoffrey are changed irrevocably. On Park Crescent, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news of the expected enemy landing on the beaches of Brighton. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, while Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton's Royal Pavilion his English HQ On Park Crescent, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news of the expected enemy landing on the beaches. It is a year of change. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, and Evelyn, desperate to feel useful, begins reading to some of the prisoners. An evocative and deeply absorbing novel about an English family in Brighton during the shadow of World War II.