Toby and Elinor, brother and sister, closest friends and confidants, are sharers of a dark secret, carried from the sweltering summer of 1912 into the battlefields of France and wartime London in 1917. This is a masterful novel that portrays the staggering human cost of the Great War. The enormity of the war's impact - not only on soldiers at the front but on the loved ones they leave behind - is poignantly expressed in this unflinching and elegant prose.