Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17672 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Mail on Sunday
`Earthy, original and very witty'

The Sunday Times
`Moggach effectively presents the psychological effects of war.. vividly evokes wartime London'

The Times
`In the Dark offers a pungently convincing account of what life in First World War London must have been like, with an unexpected and thrilling denouement'

Customer Reviews

CLEVERLY CONSTRUCTED, A SQUIRMING SNAKE OF A NOVEL
If you like to be teased, surprised, intrigued and intermittently moved then buy this. It has a gripping story with lots of wartime detail, and characters that could grace a Dickens novel. It's not for the prudish though, as it snakes around a number of relationships, but it's never salacious, just inviting and involving.
You don't see the ending coming, which makes it better to read than many over-critiqued films are to watch.
Buy it and enjoy the fireworks!

Grim life in London, WWI.
This is basically a love story set in the dark days of WWI, when soldiers are returning home unable to speak of the horrors that they have witnessed. As usual Deborah Moggach manages to explore the alternative facets of the time she is writing about, and that is what makes this such an enthralling read.

The lives of the lodgers, the maid, who seems little more than a slave, but grateful to have a position, and Eithne and her son, who run the boarding house, are all portrayed in their grim reality; and then Neville arrives. Eithne is blind to everything but the excitement he brings into her life. But...carry on reading as of course there is more to most of the characters than meets the eye.

This is another excellent book from Deborah Moggach, although I did find it a little slow at the beginning, hence 4 stars, but glad I persevered.

Brilliant!
In the Dark Deborah Moggach has long been one of the best writers in English, and under-appreciated, but this is her best book to date. Many authors have described WW1 profiteers, but none ever managed to give them so much as a vestige of humanity. Moggach achieves this by first showing us the woman who will fall in love with profiteer Turk. She shows us the woman's despair, and how she needs to be rescued. Result: we fear troubles arriving for Turk because of what they will do to Eithne. A brilliant strategy by a master writer.

As for Eithne's priggish son, Ralph, we see him skewered on a butterfly collector's needle.

If you already know Moggach's work, this will surpass your expectations. If you don't -- what a treat you have in store.