Boy of My Heart

A mother waits at the window, watching the road for her boy. His name is Roland, but she calls him Little Yeogh Wough, the name from his childhood, from before the trenches, before the uniform made him a stranger to himself. This is England in the final days of the Great War, and every knock at the door might bring him home or take him away forever. Marie Connor Leighton renders the weeks of waiting with devastating precision: the way hope flickers at sunrise and gutters at dusk, the memories that surface unbidden, a small hand in hers, a laugh now lost somewhere in the mud of the Western Front. This is not a story of battles or generals. It is the intimate, aching portrait of one woman measuring the cost of conflict in the space between a letter and a silence, between the child she raised and the man war has made him.