22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson, Fig Tree, $32.95
There is no shortage of stories inspired by the terrors of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Europe, but Amanda Hodgkinson’s debut novel is so much more than that — beneath the story’s wartime bunker is a complex, intriguing and, in snatched moments, deeply sensual love story punctuated with dark surprises at every turn.
Silvana and Janusz seem made for each other when they first meet in small-town Poland in 1937. Barely into adulthood and immediately giddy with sexual attraction, they are eager to explore their lust as it develops into love.
Silvana, a pretty peasant girl with a strained relationship with her tragic drunken mother, easily loses her heart to Janusz, who has a natural bent for fixing mechanical things, but whose upwardly mobile family is eager for him to go to university and study law or enter the priesthood.
Yet this is not to be. Marriage follows a surprise pregnancy and the couple’s upbeat new life in a flat in Warsaw is cut brutally short by the war. Janusz heads off to fight, leaving Silvana and their baby son, Aurek, in the wrong place when the Germans invade.
What happens to each during the shambolic war and how that plays out when they are finally reunited on British shores provides the framework for a compelling and powerful study of love and loss in its many guises.
Told in alternate chapters, which jump both between each of our protagonists and forward and back in time, the author also manages to create a sharp sense of dramatic tension as painful secrets of unspeakable wartime trauma are revealed.
At the end of the war, Silvana and her son are discovered living like animals in the forest and this theme of the sanctuary of nature in its wildest forms runs through the book. When Silvana comes together with her husband in a new and strange land, nothing is the same and the scars of what each has endured seem to conspire to tear them apart.
Hodgkinson’s language is precise and spare, reflecting the uncomfortable situations that our pair continually find themselves in, but her imagery is dense and evocative, making the emotional subtext of the novel resonate long after the final page.
About the author
Books were an essential part of growing up for Amanda, whose parents ran a second-hand bookshop in a village in southern England. “I was 10 when we had the bookshop and I began to read obsessively. That was when I decided I wanted to write,” says Amanda, 47.
22 Britannia Road is her first novel. “It took me several years to write. I was working at the same time and I had my two daughters and family to care for. But the last year I spent on [it] was different. I gave up work, ignored the housework and wrote every day. During the final two weeks, I wrote through the day, slept for a couple of hours, then got up in the night and began again. I think that kind of devotion and passion is what a book needs.”
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