cover image We Will Remember

We Will Remember

Elizabeth Darrell. St. Martin's Press, $26.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-312-14066-3

Darrell delivers another well-crafted novel of love and war in the Sheridan Family saga (after And in the Morning), this one set in Dorset, England, in 1946. David Sheridan, a former RAF fighter pilot, suffers emotional scars from internment by the Japanese and subsequent indignities. He returns home to assume his place as landowner and squire of Tarrant Hall, and to set a wedding date with Pat Chandler. Before he is free to wed, however, he must travel to Singapore to learn the fate of a Chinese nurse he married in 1941. Meanwhile, David's mother, Marion, who ran the estate during the war, falls in love with a man whose motives her artist daughter, Vesta, mistrusts. For her part, Vesta plans to marry her sometime professional partner, the charismatic American war correspondent Brad Holland. Circumstances, including burgeoning Cold War tensions, conspire to change everyone's relationships, as the Sheridans and those they love deal with human frailties and discover new truths. At times, the narrative reads more like a history lesson than a novel, but it's a memorable, full-blooded historical. (Feb.)