The Red Planet

The war happens elsewhere. In the quiet English village of Wellingsford, it arrives as telegrams, as absences, as the particular silence that falls over a household when a son does not come home. Major Duncan Meredyth knows this silence intimately. A battlefield injury has left him in a wheelchair, his military career ended, his future a country town where everyone knows what he lost. When he delivers the news of Lieutenant Oswald Fenimore's death to Sir Anthony and Lady Fenimore, he enters a world of grief that mirrors his own. What follows is a portrait of a community confronting loss, and the love and mystery that persist even when everything has changed. Locke writes with quiet devastation about the war's true casualties: those left behind in villages like Wellingsford, watching and waiting, finding ways to endure. His disabled hero was unusual for 1917, and the novel's refusal to sentimentalize suffering gives it a power that outlasts its era.