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This Time Of Dying by Reina James

Fiction March 2007
Paperback (198 x 129mm)
£7.99
304 pp.
978 1 84627 046 8

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'Finely written and affecting.' Guardian

'A completely engrossing portrait of the relationships between some tantalisingly interesting characters... truly touching. I absolutely loved it.' Margaret Forster

'A moving novel about the persistence of the ordinary during extraordinary times.' Financial Times

It is October 1918 and London is gathering in its dead. For Henry Speake, of Speake & Son Undertakers, laying to rest the shattered young bodies of those sent home from the Front to die has become a grimly familiar duty. But what he is seeing now, as influenza claims its victims with increasing speed and force, is something different; for the first time in his life, Henry feels overwhelmed by death. Unable to share his fears with his waspish, disapproving sisters, Henry turns instead to Mrs Allen Thompson, a recently widowed school teacher, so beginning a friendship which gradually, stumblingly, pulls them in a direction neither has been prepared for.