“Mother’s Boy” by Patrick Gale (2022)

“The ship was under attack and horribly exposed by a clear night and a full moon.”

I don’t read an awful lot of historical fiction, but I’m always willing to try. And so we fly back a hundred years to Cornwall to meet a young poet.

Laura Bartlett and Charlie Causley meet in 1914 when she is working as a housemaid and he for the village doctor in Teignmouth, Cornwall. Instantly smitten, they embark on a romance which is interrupted by war. When Charlie returns, he is not the same man, now broken ...