My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

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What to expect

A stunning novel of the First World War, perfect for fans of Sebastian Faulks and Sadie Jones, which tells the experiences of the women left at home as much as the men in the trenches.

While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country, their survival and their sanity in the trenches of Flanders, Nadine Waveney, Julia Locke and Rose Locke do what they can at home. Beautiful, obsessive Julia and gentle, eccentric Peter are married: each day Julia goes through rituals to prepare for her beloved husband's return. Nadine and Riley, only eighteen when the war starts, and with problems of their own already, want above all to make promises – but how can they when the future is completely out of their hands? And Rose? Well, what did happen to the traditionally brought-up women who lost all hope of marriage, because all the young men are dead?

Moving between Ypres, London and Paris, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You is a deeply affecting, moving and brilliant novel of love and war, and how they affect those left behind as well as those who fight.

Critics Review

  • ‘This is the finest Great War novel since Susan Hill’s ‘Strange Meeting’. Louisa Young weaves the experiences of her characters using an urgent, theatrical, staccato style that is probably best appreciated as an audio book, especially when read by the phenomenal Dan Stevens, who invests the characters with an immediately recognisable individuality whether they are thinking, writing, speaking – or, indeed, desperately trying to speak’
    Independent on Sunday

    ‘Every once in a while comes a novel that generates its own success, simply by being loved. Louisa Young’s My Dear I Wanted to Tell You inspires the kind of devotion among its readers not seen since David Nicholls’ One Day’
    The Times

    ‘Birdsong for the new millennium’
    Tatler

    ‘Powerful, sometimes shocking, boldly conceived, it fixes on war’s lingering trauma to show how people adapt – or not – and is irradiated by anger and pity’
    The Sunday Times

    ‘[A] tender, elegiac novel. Others have been here before, of course, from Sebastian Faulks to Pat Barker, but Young belongs in their company’
    Mail on Sunday

    ‘Unmissable … in crisp poignant prose Young explores what war really means in terms of mental anguish, while cleverly commenting on class and sex’
    Marie Claire

    ‘Weaving heartbreakingly painful irony, heroic sacrifice, human weakness, vanity, tragedy and the purest of loves, you’ll be left sobbing and grasping onto any hope that all is not lost amid the poppies, the guns and the hospital beds’
    Easy Living

    ‘A memorable and unusual novel which explores new ground in the literature of the Great War’
    Linda Grant

    ‘This novel is a triumph’
    Elizabeth Jane Howard

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