The Middle of the Road: A Novel

In the shattered aftermath of the Great War, Bertram Pollard returns home to find the real battle has only begun. Philip Gibbs, one of Britain's most celebrated war correspondents, renders with devastating clarity the invisible wounds that no battlefield map can show. Bertram loves his wife Joyce, but the man who came back from the trenches is not the man who left. Haunted by what he witnessed, disconnected from a civilian world that cannot comprehend his silence, he sits trapped in the middle of a road he cannot walk in either direction. This is no triumphant homecoming but a quiet, gutting exploration of what happens when a nation's heroes are expected to resume normal life while carrying an unreadable grief. Gibbs writes with the reporter's eye for detail and the novelist's compassion for human frailty. For readers of the Lost Generation, Vera Brittain, and the great WWI memoirs.