"I hope I would have the faith and strength of mind to peacefully resist and dissuade him."

Quaker brothers Charlie and Paul Lamb are caught up in the pacifist movement, then called to account for their actions when they register as conscientious objectors. For Paul's girlfriend Miriam Morningstar, his actions are less palatable - and Miriam's mother has plenty of her own demons to face.

This *really* picked up towards the end. I posted a few weeks ago that I wasn't very enthused about this? Well, by the end it still didn't make my list of favourites but I broke through and finished it. (the fact that I had to break through to finish it is perhaps not the biggest compliment towards the book...) But suddenly it all got much more interesting - the strands started to come together, the end of the war was in sight.

Paul Lamb was by far the more sympathetic brother - Charlie is rambunctious and impetuous and a little too clever for his own good, convinced of his actions to run his life however he likes with little thought for others. Paul is much more gentle, more secure in his faith but less able to articulate it intelligently. Miriam is confident and likeable and impassioned - a pleasant blend of the two brothers. In the alternative timeline, I felt I should like Esther (as a fellow young female physicist from a specific minority religion - or at least I used to match all those adjectives), but she comes across as so hard and with so little love for her husband, so little rationality behind some of her personal interactions, that I found it very hard to support her perspective. I think I'd have enjoyed this a lot more if I had identified with one or more of the characters, but I found them all rather remote.

Obviously I didn't live through WWII London but this felt pretty credibly set - the geography seemed to flow (although they are areas of London that I don't know that well) and the time was vivid - particularly Miriam's experiences in wartime London and Charlie's life on the farm.

This is the first novel I've come across addressing life from either a Quaker or pacifist perspective, and I was quite surprised to find it was written by a German who had little experience of either in her personal life - it's a very unusual perspective to take. ( )