Evacuees

Tuesday

Amanda Craig

Rather in the lurch: Small Bomb at Dimperley, by Lissa Evans, reviewed

From our UK edition

Stories and films set in stately homes continue to fascinate us, and Lissa Evans’s latest novel is likely to increase our appetite. It is 1945, and Dimperley Manor, the large, dilapidated home of the Vere-Thissetts near Aylesbury, has been almost emptied of its wartime evacuees. Only the widowed Zena Baxter (who adores Dimperley) and her small daughter remain, and the place has become a millstone round the neck of the heir, Valentine. The new baronet is expected to marry a rich bride to save his ancestral home. The nation, battered and bloodied, has just voted overwhelmingly for Labour. Is it a new dawn or a disaster? All this might seem familiar to fans of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Hannah Rothschild and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn.

Monday

Stephen L. Miller

Ron DeSantis models presidential behavior

In the week-long fallout from the Hamas massacre in Israel and Israel’s military counteroffensive, the sitting president and the GOP front-runner were more publicly focused on their own pet projects than the concern that Americans were perhaps trapped in Israel. As of today, the death count of Americans murdered by the Hamas excursion stands at thirty, and it may rise. That number is also not accounting for the dozen or so hostages that the State Department cannot or won’t confirm. To the public, Americans in Israel seem to be little more than an afterthought to this administration, much the same way the Biden administration would not be forthcoming about Americans trapped in Afghanistan.

Thursday

Chloë Ashby

The plight of the evacuee: Asylum Road, by Olivia Sudjic, reviewed

From our UK edition

Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts, white space. The past interrupts the present, which in turn tugs at the future. It begins and ends in a car — a couple ‘side by side, in motion with a change of view’ – and all the while the reader too is in a state of flux, unsettled. That’s a state Sudjic’s protagonist, Anya, is familiar with. Along with other unaccompanied children, she was evacuated from Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. Sent to live with her aunt in Glasgow, she’s been searching for a sense of belonging ever since.