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    The Poppy Wife: A Novel of the Great War
    The Poppy Wife: A Novel of the Great War
    The Poppy Wife: A Novel of the Great War
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Poppy Wife: A Novel of the Great War

    Written by Caroline Scott

    Narrated by Lucy Paterson and Chris Harper

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    In the tradition of Jennifer Robson and Hazel Gaynor, this unforgettable debut novel is a sweeping tale of forbidden love, profound loss, and the startling truth of the broken families left behind in the wake of World War I.

    1921. Survivors of the Great War are desperately trying to piece together the fragments of their broken lives. While many have been reunited with their loved ones, Edie’s husband Francis has not come home. Francis is presumed to have been killed in action, but Edie believes he might still be alive.

    Harry, Francis’s brother, was there the day Francis was wounded. He was certain it was a fatal wound—that he saw his brother die—but as time passes, Harry begins questioning his memory of what happened. Could Francis, like many soldiers, merely be lost and confused somewhere? Hired by grieving families, Harry returns to the Western Front to photograph gravesites. As he travels through battle-scarred France and Belgium gathering news for British wives and mothers, he searches for evidence of Francis.

    When Edie receives a mysterious photograph of Francis, she is more convinced than ever he might still be alive. And so, she embarks on a journey in the hope of finding some trace of her husband. Is he truly gone? And if he isn’t, then why hasn’t he come home?

    As Harry and Edie’s paths converge, they get closer to the truth about Francis and, as they do, are faced with the life-changing impact of the answers they discover.

    Artful and incredibly moving, The Poppy Wife tells the unforgettable story of the soldiers lost amid the chaos and ruins, and those who were desperate to find them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateNov 12, 2019
    ISBN9780062955340
    Author

    Caroline Scott

    Caroline Scott is a freelance writer and historian specializing in WWI and women’s history, with a PhD from Durham University. Born in the UK, Caroline currently resides in France. The Poppy Wife is partially inspired by her family history.

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    Reviews for The Poppy Wife

    4/5

    53 ratings5 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Everyone in the book is miserable and grieving after the war. Harry and Edie have trouble communicating about the fate of Francis. All very sad.
    • 3/5
      3.5 stars.

      Set in 1921, The Poppy Wife by Caroline Scott is a poignant novel that offers a heartbreaking glimpse of families searching for answers about their missing and deceased loved ones after World War I.

      Edie Blythe is shocked to receive a picture of her husband, Francis, four years after he is reported missing during his service in World War I.  This raises many questions including whether or not he is still, in fact, alive. Edie reaches out to her brother-in-law Harry who served with his brother during the war. Harry is certain his brother is dead, but, like Edie, there is a glimmer of hope Francis might have survived. Harry is already traveling throughout France taking photos of soldiers' graves for their grieving families. Using Francis' photographs to guide him, Harry retraces his brother's footsteps in hopes of finding out the truth.

      Written mostly from Harry's perspective as he endeavors to find the graves of fallen soldiers, he is quite introspective as he flashes back to his wartime experiences. The pages are filled with long, descriptive passages of battles and military life. While the prose is quite descriptive, the story gets bogged down with the lengthy, overly detailed passages. In the present, Harry meets many interesting people on his journey which provides readers with insight into how former soldiers and their families cope in the aftermath of war.

      Several chapters are written from Edie's point of view as she wrestles with the possibility that Francis is still alive. Her remembrances of her husband are tender yet a bit painful as she realizes how much war and loss changed him.  Edie sets out on her trip to try to learn the truth about Francis.  After a shocking discovery, Edie returns home where she tries to put her grief and guilt behind her.

      Inspired by Caroline Scott's family history, The Poppy Wife is a very bittersweet novel that highlights the uncertainty families endured when their loved one is declared missing. I highly recommend this educational novel to readers of historical fiction.
    • 4/5
      It has been four years since Edie Blythe has seen her husband, Francis, alive.  He is officially missing, but presumed dead in the Great War.  When Edie receives a picture of Francis in the mail, she believes that he is out there somewhere, waiting to be found. Edie sends her brother-in-law, Harry on a mission to find Francis or his grave.  After the war, Harry has taken a job photographing graves or deceased service men for loved ones, now his brother is one more to add to the list.  As Harry returns to the war-ravaged landscape that he last knew as a soldier, the memories come flooding back and he struggles with the day that he left his brother for dead.  The Poppy Wife is a journey of finding things that are lost and examining the state of the world post World War I.  I knew that many soldiers had been listed as missing after the War and that some were alive with no memory of life before; however, the impact that these missing men had on individual lives and whole town was immense.  The writing portrayed an air of melancholy wherever the characters went and seemed to carry a weight with them throughout the story.  While I expected the story to be about Edie's journey, it was mostly told through Harry's point of view and conveyed the psychological toll of surviving the War, revisiting the ravaged towns where he fought and finding closure.  Edie's journey was also about finding closure, but focused more on discovering just what her husband as well as the other men went through during the war.  The descriptions in the book took on the heavy task of describing a world torn apart and a people trying desperately to rebuild in the face of grief from many angles to accurately describe the overwhelming feeling post World War I.
    • 5/5
      Poignant, insightful, and profoundly moving!The Poppy Wife is predominantly set in the French countryside during 1921, as well as 1917, and is told from two different perspectives. Edie, a young British wife who after receiving a picture of her missing husband journeys to France to find him, dead or alive, and discover his fate wherever he may be, and Harry, the youngest of three brothers who endeavours to help his sister-in-law and others find some form of closure even while his own experiences and memories of war still plague and haunt him day and night.The prose is poetic, expressive, and stunningly vivid. The characters are damaged, determined, and courageous. And the plot is a heartrending, utterly absorbing tale about life, love, loneliness, familial relationships, heartbreak, war, loss, grief, guilt, hope, loyalty, and survival.Overall, The Poppy Wife is a beautifully written, exceptionally atmospheric novel that transports you to another time and place and immerses you so thoroughly into the personalities, feelings, and lives of the characters you can’t help but be affected. It is without a doubt one of my favourite novels of the year that reminds us of the horrific consequences of war and the thousands of nameless men who still remain scattered underneath a savage battlefield. It’s emotive, powerful and as Kipling so iconically stated, “lest we forget.”
    • 4/5
      A story of love, loss, guilt, and hope, The Poppy Wife is a moving and poignant debut from Caroline Scott.Three years after the end of the Great War, Edie receives a photograph of her husband in the mail. There is no note with the photo, in which Edie thinks Francis looks much older than when she saw him last just months before he was declared missing in action, and only a blurred French postmark provides any clues as to its origin. Unable to ignore the possibility her husband somehow survived the war, Edie travels to France in search of answers.Harry has never doubted his older brother died that day in the mud of Ypres, he saw the bullets rip through his body on the battlefield. So, as Harry travels the French countryside photographing graves for mourning relatives in England, he searches for his brother’s resting place. Yet as long as Francis remains listed as MIA, neither officially dead or alive, perhaps he, and Edie, have cause to hope.The Poppy Wife is a stunning story moving between two timelines. The first during the final years of WWI primarily explores Harry’s experience of war, fighting alongside his brothers along the Front. The second takes place in 1921, where the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Edie and Harry as they travel independently, and together, searching for any sign of Francis.Scott highlights a devastating aspect of the WWI’s aftermath in The Poppy Wife. During the war hundreds of thousands of fallen soldiers were buried without proper records, and after its end, the final resting place of almost as many remained unidentified. This left some families in limbo, never absolutely certain about the fate of their loved one. For many years after the war, the loved ones of the ‘lost’ journeyed to countries such as France and Belgium in the hopes of either finding their father or son, brother or husband alive, or proof of their death.It is an emotionally harrowing journey for both Edie and Harry, and Scott skilfully communicates their struggle with their warring feelings of hope, guilt, and despair. Harry also finds himself constantly confronted by memories of the trauma he experienced on the battlefield, and the loss of both his brothers, and friends.Beautifully written, with description that evokes the horror of war, the battle scarred lands of France, and the fraught emotions of the characters, The Poppy Wife is a stirring and thoughtful story.