This novel takes up where The Soldier's Return left off, following the lives of the Richardson family from 1947 to the mid-1950s. The terrible upheavals of the Second World War reverberated in the peace that followed, and many found a return to the old life far more difficult than they had anticipated. If the earlier novel focused on the father, Sam, the sequel gives equal emphasis to the son, Joe, who is eight as the novel opens and an adolescent as it closes. The Richardsons, emblematic of a w...