![]() ![]() “The Summer Before the War” reveals its pleasures slowly. She tries to do right by Agatha, “a compass by which Beatrice had set her course,” while finding her place in Rye’s social scene - and struggling with complicated feelings for Hugh. Beatrice battles her vindictive aunt for control over her meager trust fund and the right to publish a volume of her father’s letters. ![]() The tension between desire and duty recurs throughout the novel. ![]() SEE PHOTOSWhat to read next if you loved these bestsellers The position was arranged through her aunt’s connection to the formidable Agatha Kent (a school board member), whose husband, John, is a senior official in the Foreign Office.Īgatha’s household includes her beloved nephews, whom she regards as sons: the Oxford-educated Hugh, training to become a surgeon and his cousin, Daniel, a scathingly witty poet whose intense male friendships make him the target of scurrilous rumors. Recovering from the death of her professor father, Beatrice has accepted a job as a Latin teacher at a local grammar school. In the summer of 1914, a young woman, Beatrice Nash, arrives in Rye, an idyllic English seaside town. Once again Simonson proves that beneath the easygoing surface of her fiction are layers of dark humor and tragedy. In her new novel, “The Summer Before the War,” Helen Simonson repeats certain elements from her wonderful 2010 debut, “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand”: a reticent approach to romance characters with a high regard for decorum and tradition and a quaint English village as her setting. ![]()
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