I read Alvesdon by historian James Holland at the end of my holiday in Sri Lanka and finished it on my first flight back. It was an enjoyable read about the joy of home in wartime, peppered with research about life on the home front, as it follows the life of a Wiltshire farming family, doing their bit to feed England in the first year of World War Two. 

The generation running the farm is the one that fought in the First World War, who are shocked to find war happening again and their children all caught up in it. The summer before war sees new loves forming and is followed by pining couples as men are sent to war and women to work on the land or in the War Office, party to the real state of British unpreparedness.

The joy of this book is that nothing much happens. Waiting for tragedy that never comes and couples to be reunited is rewarded, until the novel ends with almost five years of the war to go. I didn’t mind that, or not knowing whether the protagonists would survive, having enjoyed the gentle fly-on-the-wall view of their everyday life in this first year of war. A good read for anyone interested in the Second World War.