Peter Jameson

A London tobacco merchant goes to France in 1914 as a gunner, and the war takes the business, the marriage and the certainties one at a time. Gilbert Frankau served through Loos, the Somme and Ypres and wrote this in 1919 while it was all still raw. It is the fullest English novel about what the war did to a man''s money as well as to his nerves. Fifty-eight plates of city streets, music halls and harbours by painters including Walter Sickert and Childe Hassam run from 1724 to 1927, matching the novel''s passage from London commerce to the French coast and back.