Alive with autobiographical energies and characters of flesh-and-blood immediacy ... deeply humane and acutely truthful - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
This is a splendid book - even better than the first of what I hope will be a trilogy ... Bragg's characters are real, their relationships and problems acutely and sympathetically observed. Never mawkish, he knows the people he writes about and how they lived in working class, postwar Britain. He gets better with every novel. Dammit. - John Humphrys, Guardian Books of the Year
[A] perceptive, sparely-written novel ... The trace of memory, Bragg shows us, is an enduring inheritance for each and every one of us. - Lisa Jardine, The Times
'Sam Richardson, haunted by memories of his wartime service in Burma, has decided to make a go of his old life in Wigton. A Son of War traces with painful clarity the personal cost of Sam's rebuilding of his family life, with Ellen his wife, and his beloved son Joe. But Sam's is not the only clear voice in this perceptive, sparely-written novel ... the voices of Ellen, and above all that of Joe thread luminously through the story - intense, moving descants to Sam's shaping melody ... As a novelist, Bragg has always had a remarkable ear for strong first person women's voices. In A Son of War the effect of this is to animate the silent struggle conducted between Ellen and Sam for their son's lo
