All Roads Lead to Calvary

Jerome K. Jerome made his name making readers laugh. This novel shows what happened when the laughter stopped. Written in the aftermath of the First World War, it follows Joan Allway, a Cambridge graduate who refuses the narrow life prescribed for women and becomes instead a journalist, then an ambulance driver on the Western Front. Through her eyes, Jerome examines a world transformed by mechanized slaughter and asks what remains of innocence, faith, and purpose when everything familiar has burned. Joan collects experiences the way a surgeon collects scars, each one teaching her something about the moral muddle of modern life. This is not the Jerome of gentle jokes about boating mishaps. This is a writer who has seen something he cannot unsee, and the result is a novel that lingers like smoke.