In 1918, Rebecca West accomplished something astonishing: she wrote a novel about the invisible wounds of war when the guns had barely stopped firing. The Return of the Soldier is told through the eyes of Jenny, watching her cousin Christopher return from the French trenches not with a missing limb, but with something far more unsettling - gaps in memory that have erased his bitter marriage and left him suspended in a gentler time. Shell shock has stripped away the man Kitty married, leaving someone kinder, more innocent. Now the women who love him must decide: restore him to his true self, with all its pain? Or let him remain in the peaceful oblivion he never earned? West writes with startling modernity about what war does to those left to welcome soldiers home. This is a novel about memory as identity, about the violence of being made whole, and about the class of women who tended to men who had become strangers.
