Here’s a portion of Wiki’s summary of Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel – Warlight, which is currently keeping me totally enthralled. Alex Preston wrote in The Guardian that the novel “sucked me in deeper than any novel I can remember; when I looked up from it, I was surprised to find the 21st century still going on about me

“In London near the end of World War II, 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister Rachel are left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth, their parents having moved to Singapore.The Moth affiliates with a motley group of eccentric, mysterious, and in some ways nefarious characters who dominate the children’s experience early in the postwar period.

When Nathaniel is in his late twenties, he begins to piece together what happened during those early postwar years in what has been called “a journey through reality, recollection, and imagination”, and “as an adult looking back at traumatic childhood events and trying to work out how far they formed (or deformed) him into the person he has become”.

Having spent WW2 in Sheffield, in 1946 I moved to London when my father was demobbed from the army, like the character Nathaniel I also was 14 years old. This book is so realistic of that period that every page brings back memories for me, it’s fabulous! I can’t adequately describe how London and England generally was then but this book evokes it perfectly. As Nathaniel matures into his 20’s he moves to a small village in Suffolk, as did I also!

I have to totally endorse Alex Preston’s Guardian comment. The paragraph above that’s related to  “a journey through reality, recollection, and imagination and  how far they formed (or deformed) him into the person he has become” is absolutely true in my case, I’ve spent hours wondering about exactly that and writing extensively about it, my computer’s full of my memories of that era. At last count there were over 150 pages!