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Sadie Jones is the author of four novels, including The Outcast, winner of the Costa First Novel Award in Great Britain and a finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize/Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, Small Wars, and the bestselling The Uninvited Guests. She lives in London.
Small Wars: A Novel
by Sadie Jones
eBook
$7.24
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ISBN-13:
9780061966323
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication date: 02/09/2010
- Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 400
- File size: 570 KB
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“Sadie Jones has a long literary future ahead of her.” —Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with the Pearl Earring
Fresh off her triumphantly assured debut novel The Outcast, award-winning author Sadie Jones has again delivered a quiet masterpiece in Small Wars. Set on the colonial, war-torn island of Cyprus in 1956, Jones tells the story of a young solider, Hal Treherne, and the effects of this “small war” on him, his wife Clara, and their family. Reminiscent of classic tales of love and war such as The English Patient and Atonement, Jones’s gripping novel also calls to mind the master works of Virginia Woolf and their portrayal of the quiet desperation of a marriage in crisis. Small Wars is at once a deeply emotional, meticulously researched work of historical fiction and a profound meditation on war-time atrocities committed both on and off the battlefield.
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Publishers Weekly
In her excellent second novel (after The Outcast), Jones sets a couple down in turbulent 1956 Cyprus as the Cypriots seek union with Greece and resist British rule. British army major Hal Treherne is dispatched to Cyprus, taking along his wife, Clara, and their young twin girls. There, they fight separate, but equally maddening, battles—Clara as an army wife with babies in an increasingly dangerous land, and Hal on the front lines where, yearning for firefights, he is instead haunted by his lack of control when torture and rape occur at the hands of his own men. While Hal dodges mortal danger, Clara tries to keep the homefront together, struggling to remain supportive of him as she remains isolated with the twins and he is tormented by the violence he witnesses. After Clara narrowly avoids death, Hal makes a split-second decision with powerful implications for their future. The narrative is excruciatingly tense and also graced with real emotion as a marriage is pushed to the brink and loyalties are stretched and broken. It's the perfect mix of poignant and harrowing. (Jan.)
Library Journal
Worlds away from the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, this stunning new novel from Jones (after the highly regarded The Outcast) set in 1956 Cyprus might just as easily describe the present. In the lead-up to the Suez Canal crisis, the British occupational forces find themselves amid a terrorist campaign conducted by the EOKA, a group of Greek Cypriots set on independence at any cost via pipe bombs, rock throwing, land mines, and roadside ambushes. For their part, the British employ equally familiar counterinsurgency torture and interrogation measures to maintain order. Against this backdrop, career officer Hal Treherne and his family settle into life on the base, where Hal is charged with routing out terrorists. The daily skirmishes take a toll on Hal and undermine his marriage. VERDICT This richly imagined and warmly atmospheric story convincingly demonstrates that small wars, like all wars, are hell. This is historical fiction at its best. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/09.]—Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Kirkus Reviews
Another intensely buttoned-up British scenario from Jones, who shows a marriage and a belief tested during the Cyprus Emergency. The Outcast (2008), her powerfully visualized, emotionally devastating debut, portrayed a loner in postwar England. This follow-up focuses on a couple, Major Hal Treherne and his wife Clara. A career soldier known as a decent and fair man, Hal is posted in January 1956 to Cyprus, where colonial forces endure random bomb attacks and shootings by guerrillas seeking union with Greece. Clara and their twin daughters join him on the British base, but the two adults' lives quickly diverge to run on parallel tracks. She is confined to the roles of wife, mother and sexual partner, while his responsibilities revolve around life-and-death military operations. Jones ably delineates in clipped, cool detail the divided male and female experiences: tense domesticity versus ineradicable encounters with blood and terror. Hal's conscience is pricked by one of his subordinates, Lt. Davis, who reports that during a poorly organized mass roundup he observed the unprovoked shooting of a civilian and the rape of two women by British soldiers. Col. Burroughs, who ordered the roundup, disparages the witness and reprimands Hal. The gulf between his integrity and the military's slippery pragmatism forces Hal finally to risk everything he previously held dear. A darkly compelling account of honor and disillusionment with contemporary resonance, less wrenching than Jones's first novel but nevertheless a confirmation of her considerable talent.
Boston Globe
A taut and transfixing novel… [Jones is] a gifted young author.Christian Science Monitor
Ambitious and thematically charged…A timely novel, as well as a harrowing oneNew York Times Book Review
In lean, penetrating prose...Jones serves her themes most potently with an unflinching tumble of violent encounters that effectively transform Hal’s liberation...into a haunting act of transcendence.