England, My England

D.H. Lawrence wrote these stories in the shadow of the Great War, and it shows in every fractured marriage, every failed connection, every man grappling with who he is when everything we believed about England has collapsed. The collection opens with its title novella: Egbert, a sensitive man of the old order, retreats to the countryside to landscaping his cottage and his identity. His wife Winifred watches him try to reassert himself, and the war will do what his gardening cannot. It's a devastating portrait of masculine crisis, of someone trying to prove their worth in a world that no longer has use for what they offer. Other stories cut just as deep: a blind man whose other senses make him more alive than his seeing wife; a doctor who saves a girl from drowning and loses himself in the process; lovers on a train conducting their affair with brutal frankness. Lawrence was never comfortable, and these stories aren't either. They probe at the polite surfaces of English life and find something raw underneath, something wounded and dangerous. For readers who want fiction that refuses to look away.