Unexploded

A novel of fine-tuned beauty, sharp insight and emotional subtlety—about a family in the shadow of WWIIMay, 1940. Brighton. Wartime.On Park Crescent, a sunlit and usually tranquil street, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news. The enemy is expected to land on the beaches of Brighton any day.It is a year of tension and change. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, while young Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton's Royal Pavilion his English HQ. He spends hours with his friends imagining life in Brighton under Hitler's rule. And as the rumours continue to fly and the days tick on, Evelyn struggles to fall in with the war effort and the constraints of her role in life, her thoughts becoming tinged with a mounting, indefinable desperation.Then she meets Otto Gottlieb, a 'degenerate' German-Jewish painter and prisoner in her husband's...