Vera Brittain

This poignant work collects letters written from 1913 to 1918 between Vera Brittain and four young men - her fiance Roland Leighton, her younger brother Edward, and their two close friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow - who were killed in World War I. While this correspondence inspired Testament of Youth, Brittain's classic memoir of her wartime experiences, most of the letters are published here for the first time. Taken together, the letters present a remarkable and profoundly moving portrait of five idealistic youths caught up in the cataclysm of war. Spanning the duration of the war, the letters vividly convey the uncertainty, confusion, and almost unbearable suspense of the tumultuous war years. They offer both male and female perspectives and reveal important historical insights by allowing the reader to witness and understand the Great War from a variety of viewpoints: that of the soldier in the trenches, of the volunteer nurse in military hospitals, and even of the civilians on the home front. As World War I fades from living memory, these letters are a powerful and stirring testament to a generation forever shattered and haunted by grief, loss, and promise unfulfilled.

Contains primary source material.

In Testament of Youth, one of the most famous and best loved autobiographies of the First World War, Very Brittain wrote both a heartbreaking record of those agonizing years and a loving memorial to a genereation destroyed by war. In this sequel, she continues the story of those who survived. Once again Vera Brittain interlaces private experience with the wide sweep of public events. Personal happiness in marriage and the birth of children, pride in her work as writer and campaigner are set against the fears, frustrations and achievements of the years 1925-1950. The depression, the growth of Nazism, the peace movements of the 'thirties, the Abdication, the Spanish Civil War, the horror and heroism of the Second World War come alive again through the eyes of this remarkable woman, herself a testament to all that is best in the times she lived through.

Adrian Carbury, born in 1925 grew up with war and violence. Sent to America with his sister to escape the Blitz of WWII, he later returns to England and becomes a member of a bomb disposal team. Adrian's father, a popular liberal clergyman married to a famous actress, earned a VC in France during WWI. He views the second war (WWII) in a very different light from his son. --biblio.co.uk.