L'auteur a un talent réel pour décrire les sentiments et les émotions des différents personnages et on ne peut que montrer une empathie totale avec eux. Would probably have benefited from deciding what it was - literary (less plot, more navel-gazing) or genre (more plot, less navel-gazing) and sticking with it. Did a couple of interesting things, was appropriately gruesome, interesting characters, and some facinating detail about an aspect of the war which I had not previously considered. I ripped through the last 200 pages or so at lightning speed, unable to wait and discover what would happen next. She followed that with her Egyptian trilogy of novels: Baby Love (which was listed for the Orange Prize), Desiring Cairo and Tree of Pearls.

His commanding officer will be Peter Locke, who has left his wife Julia and cousin Rose behind in England. The title, the cover, and the summary all drew me in promising an epic love story about enduring love in times of harshness of war, but I was left feeling unfulfilled in the “epic romance” department.It’s not your will, your desire, your willingness to fight on—it’s a separate part of you, but it’s one they don’t understand yet, because they never yet put this much on a soldier. Maar Riley is gewond en verminkt teruggekeerd; een normaal leven lijkt onbegrijpelijk en liefde onbevattelijk. The story begins with Nadine and her brother meeting the young Riley, the son of a working class couple contrasting with Nadine's higher class. We meet Rose, the cousin of a serving offier working in a rehabilitation unit for wounded soldiers, Nadine, a young VAD doing her bit at home and abroad, and Julia, a young wife who struggles to find a way to do her part as anything other than a beautiful wife. The title comes from a standard letter which was provided to soldiers who were wounded and admitted to hospital.

Peter Locke meanwhile, verging on a nervous breakdown, arrives home in Sidcup to beautiful, but shallow and seemingly self-absorbed wife, Julia, whose only aim in life appears to be to keep herself lovely for her husband, and who is bitterly disappointed when Peter cannot bring himself to put the war behind him and enjoy his leave with her. Worried that her husband is slipping away, Julia is left alone with her fears when Rose joins the nursing corps to work with a pioneering plastic surgeon treating wounded and disfigured soldiers. My Dear I Wanted to Tell You’ is a big First World War novel, moving between Ypres, Amiens, London, Paris, Lancashire and Kent to tell of the experiences of women left at home as much as those of men in the trenches.Other themes explored are class mobility and gender, although these can never be avoided when writing a book based in world war 1. Young is particularly good at getting a person's thoughts with all their conflicts and prejudices, hopes and desparation spun out across the page.

To save time and unnecessary distress to loved ones back home, the army designed a standard postcard for injured men to complete. A good although not brilliant book – I preferred Atonement which had much more depth (for example this book is very much written in the third-person multi-narrator but with lots of insights into characters thoughts – the very idea Atonement challenges). So too the story of Nadine Waveney, a young woman of her times who is living in the midst of a cultural shift. I loved how Rose, who was never expected to marry and felt ineffective because of it, suddenly felt she had a place in the world. It seemed to Purefoy that if your legs are shot to pieces no one expects you to keep going, but if your nerve, the machinery of your self-control is shot to pieces, they do.

In addition, there's Riley's commanding officer, Peter Locke, and his wife, Julia, and Peter's cousin, Rose. I realize that she did this as a means of illustrating the changes in the characters life, but none the less it made me a little crazy. Still though, any novel that can still make you feel the pain and horror of hte trenches (or rather, imagine you can), and the visceral exhaustion and suffering of the nurses who also served (one passage where Young describes nursing conditions of "8 days on the trot underwear", fleas, and cold water washing really hit home), while also being genuinely entertaining, is worth reading. And yet My Dear I Wanted to Tell You also attempts to be a romance book, and there precisely it comes to a screeching halt.