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9780349116891

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'Compelling.' INDEPENDENT 'Woodruff writes vividly' THE TIMES 'Woodruff evokes the passion and turbulence of their experience in phenomenally physical detail.' DAILY EXPRESS

This is a novel the likes of which you will seldom se again, as it's the product of a very specific time in the history and culture of Britain. The author, now 87, is already known as a historian, and for the Road to Nab End and Beyond Nab End, stories about his upbringing in a small northern town in the 1920s, his migration to London and his subsequent admission to the Catholic Workers College in Oxford. This novel too is more social history than imaginative fiction. It tells the story of a group of male friends, the rowing eight at an Oxford college, at the beginning of the Second World War. The narrative is remembered by the only survivor, the former cox, who sees a photograph of the youthful crew sixty years later. The characters represent stereotypes of the era - the communist Scotsman, the mathematical genius, the landed aristocrat, the charming and feckless Irishman, the handsome, courageous leader who was the crew's stroke. The narrative is equally predictable, beginning with the crew celebrating a win, then following each of the characters through the course of the war. The cox marries a German woman and brings her back to England. The rest, on land, sea or in the air, die. The novel will appeal to readers who have a taste for nostalgia, or who enjoy reading how particular age felt to those who lived through it. Curiously, it might also attract those who are surfeited by vulgarity, sex, violence and shopping, as it has a naive and martial setting, the author is more interested in domestic detail than in gruelling accounts of bloody and desperate actions. Don't buy this is you're allergic to words like 'God', 'honour' and 'bravery' used in a non-ironic sense. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

From his birth in 1916 until he ran away to London, William Woodruff lived in the heart of Blackburn's weaving community. He eventually went to Oxford University, is now 86 and lives in Florida.

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