The Truants
1904
A British officer serving in the French Foreign Legion makes a desperate choice: he abandons his post to return home, driven by a jealous fury. Someone has been pursuing his wife, and he intends to find out who. But home proves more treacherous than any North African garrison. His father, Sir John, rules the family estate with iron composure, while his wife Millie trembles beneath the surface of respectability. As the officer hunts for his rival, he discovers that the true betrayal may not be the one he came to punish, but the one he's been committing all along through years of absence and neglect. A. E. W. Mason constructs a taut meditation on masculine pride, the costs of escape, and the question of what we're really fleeing from. The novel moves with quiet urgency toward a confrontation that implicates everyone in the household, revealing how the truants among us are not just those who run away, but those who stay and pretend everything is fine.
