Thirteen Travelers

The war is over, but peace has not brought peace. In 1919 London, a fashionable block of flats called Hortons shelters twelve souls grappling with a world that has fundamentally changed. A young widow discovers that grief is easier to carry than the expectations of the living. A valet watches his employers lose their fortune while he gains something more dangerous: choice. A nurse returned from the front finds the domesticity of the building more terrifying than any battlefield. Hugh Walpole, at the height of his powers, weaves twelve interconnected stories that capture a civilization in delicate crisis. The old hierarchies have softened, the old certainties dissolved, and these travelers, residents and servants alike, must find new ways to be human when the rules no longer apply. Written with psychological precision and quiet devastating beauty, Thirteen Travelers maps the interior landscape of a generation learning to live in the ruins of its own history. For readers who cherish the granular drama of moral compromise and small, irreversible changes.