Soldier's Return

Right from the start, when the train carrying British soldier Sam Richardson home to Wigton after his service in the Burma campaign breaks down two miles from town and he and his army comrades have to walk home, it is clear we are in the hands of a compassionate, clear-sighted writer. Bragg's work has been compared to that of Hardy and D.H. Lawrence, not without some justice. His smalltown people are closely and warmly observed, but without a shred of sentimentality, and although this story is familiar a man home from a dehumanizing war finds it hard to readjust it has seldom been imbued with such rueful humanity. For Sam, England after WWII, and after the sufferings he and his men endured in the frightful jungle campaigns, is stuffy and limiting; soon he starts dreaming of wider horizons. His adored wife, Ellen, however, is happily rooted in the little northern town where she grew up; their small son, Joe, who has hardly known his father, is bewitched but also terrified of him. How the family works out its fate in the shabby postwar years is Bragg’s story, and he makes of it something at once endearing and heroic. So many scenes, the regimental reunion, Joe's efforts to win friends among the tough town kids, a final scene at a railway station as heartrending as the movie Brief Encounter, linger in the mind. The book is a small classic, deeply touching and true. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction-novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Following The Soldier's Return, heralded as "a novel written in fine steel sentences and granite paragraphs" by the Washington Post, and the equally brilliant A Son of War, Melvyn Bragg brings "one of the finest sagas of postwar Britain" (London Sunday Telegraph) to a stunning conclusion. Set in the 1950s, this absorbing novel follows the intertwined fates of people crossing boundaries in their lives. Alive with a wide cast of characters, Crossing the Lines vividly portrays the spirit and atmosphere of the mid-century and the profound changes taking place at the time, in morals, religion, music, and social class. Moving and evocative, this masterly novel and the two that have preceded it are rightfully hailed as contemporary classics.