All Else Is Folly

A Canadian officer shattered on the Somme drifts through the quiet English countryside, his body mending while his spirit remains in ruins. He falls for a young woman whose husband languishes in a German prison camp, their connection deepening as both confront what the war has taken from them. What begins as a tale of wartime romance becomes something far more unsettling: a clear-eyed reckoning with the particular torments of waiting, of wounded men learning to inhabit their own brokenness, and of women whose loyalty has become its own kind of cage. Acland, writing with the hard-won clarity of one who knows, paints not the glory they promised but the strange, hollowed-out years after the fighting stops. The title lands like a bitter verdict: all else is folly, the Cause, the sacrifice, the waiting, but what else is there? This is war literature for readers who want to follow the camera past the battlefields into the haunted rooms where the real losses begin.