Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray (Random House UK, Vintage)

 A priviliged young woman Amy Vanneck searches through vast and now abandoned battlefields in France for her fiance Edward Haslam, who was missed in action in WW1. She finds help from officer of British troops, that gather and try to identify dead bodies of soldiers. British troops work with Chinese labourers and when they find a gruesome place, called Two Storm Wood full of dead people, everything changes. Were they murdered and by whom?

The atmosphere of the novel is on point, the reader can almost smell death, feel the neverending fog and desolation of a wounded landscape. Bare nature and emptiness in post war people, all the atrocities of war.

There is also the omni-present accent on discrimination between social classes, rangs, sexes and races, which was something common in these times and author emphasises shifts in human minds after the war, when new possibilities, and hopes start to rise. Amy is a symbol of brave, fearless and modern woman.

Overall good read.

3/5