2nd #review for #Peace Lily in UK. Another 5*s!

Peace Lily is a hugely satisfying sequel to Daffodils, which covered the years before and during the Great War. While we’re all concentrating thoughts on WWI and its horrors, it’s good to have a book that looks at the aftermath, in a world where so much should have changed, and yet so much failed to do so. Jem Phipps, minus an arm, is released from the army to a life without work, home, or much hope. His wife Katie, who’d finished the war as an expert mechanic working in the WAAC, is now expected to return to the role of wife and domestic servant, in a society that’s still stuck fast in tradition and class and has no use for her expertise. At the other end of the social spectrum Cassandra Smythe has to reconcile her place as heiress responsible for an English country estate with her love for Douglas, a Bostonian who has no time for her mother’s fossilised prejudices. Nothing is easy, but they are all fighters. The book travels through the rural greenery of Wiltshire (I am sure all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire could be heard), the nauseating swell of a trans-Atlantic crossing, the claustrophobia of a Boston brownstone, the fresh sea-breezes of Cape Cod and the unexpected delights of a Nissan hut. I sincerely hope there’s a third book, so I can learn if Kate and Jem’s new bid for dignity and independence comes to the fruition it deserves.