The setting for this novel is a real village and valley in Southern England whose residents, in 1943, were evicted by Winston Churchill's War Office to make way for troop training and weapons testing. An official promise that they could move back when the war was over was not kept. By the war's conclusion most of the properties (used for target practice by American and British troops stationed there) were uninhabitable. No one has lived there in all the years since, and today the village is a sad, soulless, ruined place.
The village and valley are differently named in the novel because the author felt more comfortable writing within that small fiction. It tells of Juby Bench, an elderly man who, as an angry teenager, was one of the evicted all those years ago. He lives in Germany now, and has a family there, but for many years has returned to his childhood home every August. The novel is set in 'the last August of the old century', when Juby meets 16 year old Midge Miller, who at first has no interest in the ruined village, but gradually realises that without it - and this peculiar old man - she would not be here today. Here or anywhere else.
Originally published, in slightly different form, as 'Juby's Rook' (2007).
Genre: Historical
The village and valley are differently named in the novel because the author felt more comfortable writing within that small fiction. It tells of Juby Bench, an elderly man who, as an angry teenager, was one of the evicted all those years ago. He lives in Germany now, and has a family there, but for many years has returned to his childhood home every August. The novel is set in 'the last August of the old century', when Juby meets 16 year old Midge Miller, who at first has no interest in the ruined village, but gradually realises that without it - and this peculiar old man - she would not be here today. Here or anywhere else.
Originally published, in slightly different form, as 'Juby's Rook' (2007).
Genre: Historical
Used availability for Michael Lawrence's Juby's Rook