Starlight
If you’ve ever had a love affair – remember what it was like
July 1916 and in France, the Battle of the Somme rages. In November, when he turns eighteen, Lewis Friday must join the Army. Until then he has the summer. He goes to Cornwall and falls in love with Helen, a separated woman twenty years his senior. Eventually he goes to war and somehow manages to survive, sustained by her letters. But just as the war ends and he will be reunited with her, she stops writing and vanishes. Devastated and grief-stricken by the loss of everything he had hoped for, Lewis sets out to unravel the mystery of her disappearance.
This is a book for anyone who has ever had a love affair. If you’ve ever known the disbelief and wonderment as the new love begins, the joy of discovery, the golden bliss when the relationship becomes established and the heart-withering sorrow when it falls apart, you will want to read this book. Written with exquisite period detail, it is a beautiful and complex story that takes the reader to unexpected places of the heart.
Fergus O’Connell’s previous novel, Call The Swallow, was short listed for the 2002 Kerry Ingredients Irish Fiction Prize and nominated for the Hughes & Hughes / Sunday Independent Novel of the Year.
Reviews
‘The trench raid episode is a starkly realistic evocation of the terrors of trench warfare. Gritty and well researched, this novel avoids the common clichés that surround novels about the Great War. Starlight contrasts life on the Home and War fronts in a way that allows the reader to experience the emotional conflicts and problems experienced by a combatant moving between home and safety and the trenches and comradeship and danger.’
Andy Robertshaw
Director of The Royal Logistic Corps Museum
‘Terrific. I was utterly engrossed by the slowly and delicately budding love affair in Cornwall and the intercut descriptions of the war. I loved the characterisations and the details of life and loss in the trench. I really felt I was there. I just thought it ended too soon. I wanted to know more. I was gripped throughout.’
Fiona Bruce
BBC Presenter
