Bücher von Charles Gidley Wheeler

Summer, 1939: While Britain and France teeter on the brink of war with Nazi Germany, Griff Wilmot, a cavalry officer turned schoolmaster, discovers that his French wife Simone is having an affair with Lieutenant Commander Archie Trendle-Home, his closest friend. On the outbreak of war, with his home life crumbling, Griff goes back into uniform and takes command of a section of Sappers in France. Archie is given command of an elderly destroyer, and Simone finds herself acting as landlady to three Wren officers who are serving in the naval headquarters at Dover.Alone and vulnerable, Simone receives an unsettling visit from her illegitimate son, David Odell, who has come to England from New York to seek out his natural mother.When Germany invades the Low Countries in May 1940, Griff Wilmot''s section is in the front line, and he and a host of factual and fictional characters are soon caught up in the retreat to the coast and the evacuations of Boulogne and Dunkirk.No one who lived through those dark days emerged unscathed, stories of Simone, Griff, David, and Archie encapsulate those of thousands more.

In the early 19th century, Blair Harvey comes to Exeter with a degree from Oxford, and high hopes of forging a career in the legal profession. But a brush at Exeter Fair with an Irish prostitute pricks his conscience, and he seeks spiritual refuge with Dr. Percy Brougham, a high Church Anglican who is flirting with Roman Catholicism. Blair sets his sights on Brougham''s independently minded daughter Susannah. They marry, and when Brougham dies of apoplexy, Blair inherits the family fortune. He sets up a thriving shipping business in Teignmouth, and for a while assumes the role of a paterfamilias and patron of the arts. But when he witnesses the wreck of a ship off the Devon coast and is begged to lead the local people in prayer for the shipwrecked sailors, he is conscience-stricken, and undergoes an extraordinary conversion to Christianity. Obedient to the precepts of the Plymouth Brethren, Blair sells house and home in order to set himself up as the leader of a little community of Believers on the edge of Dartmoor, where he embraces a life of hardship and poverty. But as the years pass, Blair''s rigid adherence to the exclusivist teachings of the Plymouth Brethren destroys his family, his prosperity and his peace of mind, and turns him into a figure of grotesque tragedy.

''.What need have you to dread the monstrous crying of wind?''-W.B. Yeats Buenos Aires, 1939: Anna McGeoch arrives in Argentina from Scotland to join her brother and his wife and work on a Christian mission among the Matacos Indians. But within hours of her arrival she learns that her brother has been killed. Anna stays on in Buenos Aires and is welcomed into the glamorous lifestyle of the Hurlingham Club''s polo-playing community. When she marries Tito Cadoret, a life of wealth and happiness seems to lie ahead. But, unknown to Anna, Cadoret is already in thrall to a corrupt and powerful lawyer, and as the years pass, he and his family are drawn ever deeper into a dark world of murder, blackmail, and the ''Dirty War''. When, in 1982, the British Task Force sails for the Falklands, Anna''s daughter Nikki sails with it as a naval nurse aboard a hospital ship. After the battles are over, she tends the wounds of British and Argentine sailors and soldiers, and sees as first hand the tragedy and futility of armed conflict. As in the case of so many women down the centuries, Anna and Nikki suffer much in order to keep the family together, and the price they pay for personal freedom is high.

The British community of Portugal in the nineteen-thirties welcomes Ruth, the bride of wine-taster Bobby Teape, into a privileged and wealthy world of rolling hills, great rivers and endless vineyards. But the Teapes' marriage is overshadowed by guilt, because Natalia, the housemaid Ruth hires, is the girl Bobby once raped. In the post-war turbulence of Portugal under Salazar's fascist regime, the children of Ruth and Natalia inherit a future that is scarred by Bobby's secret from the past."Fasciniating...vivid...convincing in every way."--Homes and Gardens