Home Fires - Softcover

Elizabeth Day writes with unflinching, responsible honesty; I was inspired and enlightened by the deep humanity of Home Fires (Sadie Jones)

Day is an empathetic observer. She is meticulous in teaching and dissecting each sentence her characters experience ... The prose is deliberate, precise and bone dry ... Elizabeth Day pursues her study of characters attempting to keep the past at bay with a biblical intensity reminiscent of early Anita Brookner and a prose style closer to that of Pat Barker ... Home Fires conveys a broader version of life with the claustrophobia of emotional repression (Eileen Battersby, Irish Times)

Day has created a compelling study of grief, not least the conflicting ways in which the bereaved may wish to remember the dead ... A bold novel, shocking in what it confronts and also in its suggestion that love will, ultimately, survive trauma (Daily Telegraph)

Day's great strength is her insight ... An elegant, addictive portrayal of a family at war with its past. A beautifully written novel whose quietly discomfiting tone stays with you for a long while afterwards (Observer)

It's to Elizabeth Day's credit that she turns her back on the conventional narrative to explore the realistic consequences of war and violence on the women who, to cite the song to which the novel's title alludes, keep the home fires burning. Day chooses the tough option at every turn, with the result that the novel becomes a powerful and, at times, heartbreaking account of Caroline and Elsa's inability to deal with their crises. The prose is crisp and forthright, particularly when Day is describing the variations of violence, although she has a piercing eye for a telling phrase or a poetic flourish ... Home Fires is powerful and haunting, a thought-provoking testimony to the fortitude of those women and children who cope with the repercussions of war (Irish Examiner)

Deeply moving (Woman’s Own)

Very sad and very lovely (Grazia)

An elegant meditation ... Elizabeth Day's lyrical Home Fires comes highly recommended (Viv Groskop, Observer Book of the Year)

Max Weston, twenty-one, leaves for his first army posting in central Africa. What happens to him changes the lives of his family forever. At home, his parents struggle to cope. The overwhelming love Caroline has always felt for her only child is now matched by the intensity of Max's absence. The silence is broken by the arrival of Caroline's mother-in-law, Elsa, who at the age of ninety-eight can no longer look after herself. After years of living in fear of putting a foot wrong in front of this elegant, cuttingly courteous lady, finally, Caroline has the upper hand.