Writing
The Faithful
June 15 2017 Mantle
July 1936. In the Sussex village of Aldwick, sixteen-year-old Hazel is dreading another long, dull summer. But then Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts set up camp nearby, and Hazel’s summer suddenly becomes more interesting. She finds herself befriended by two very different people: Lucia, an upper-class blackshirt, fiercely passionate about the cause; and working-class Tom, increasingly scornful of Mosley’s rhetoric. As Britain is pulled towards war, Hazel’s life goes into freefall. A tangle of secrets threatens to snare her, and she must decide where to place her trust…
Fans of well-crafted period fiction will gobble down this second novel from the author of Before the Fall … West has a sure sense of the era’s sexual politics as well as its ideological ones as Hazel navigates a new life in London, while the rollicking plot becomes denser and ever more inexorable as it hurtles onwards to 1941.
Metro UK
Back to WritingA wonderfully evocative novel that slowly reveals its secrets.
Red magazine
