Introducing Where No Shadow Awaits
- Aug 18, 2025
- 2 min read
It’s nearly publication day for Where No shadow Awaits! I am so excited as I’ve lived with this novel for such a long time. The main characters began to inhabit my brain back when I was doing my PhD on women’s writing of the First World War eons ago, and they have never departed. Back then I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about women’s writing of the war and I’ve talked in recent blogs about some of the key influences, but I was also interested in the absences from that body of writing. Most of the women’s writing I examined recorded the experiences of middle- and upper-class British women. This is hardly surprising as working-class women in the early twentieth century didn’t have a lot of time to jot down their thoughts about their everyday lives. I’m sure there are exceptions, but probably not too many. I certainly didn’t come across anything that gave a personal voice to the experience of working-class women remaining in occupied Belgium and my limitations with languages would have prevented me from reading it even if I had. However, writers like Mary Borden and Ellen La Motte did give me a glimpse of what life might have been like for a girl like Gabrielle Rochard, so completely immersed in the war as to be able to identify with the soldiers.
I also read great deal of fiction from the period, about women and about men. It was important to know what the trench experience was like, in order to compare it with that of front-line women. From this, Joe Smith emerged, very young, powerless and voiceless. I thought about the landscapes he would inhabit and the communities that would sustain him. When I started writing, I didn’t know where it would end, where Joe and Gabrielle could go, but I knew that I wanted to give them agency, and perhaps, a fighting chance.
I framed them with Helen Parkes, a journalist in the 1980s who is struggling with her own demons. It is she who must discover and then tell their stories while looking for some kind of solace of her own. From the East End of London to the waste lands of First World War Flanders, I set out to represent all their experiences in a visceral way. I want the reader to live it with them, which may not always be comfortable. I have a heroine of sorts perhaps, in the VAD nurse, Mary Connelly, and a clear villain in Sergeant Alan Goodwynne, (sometimes corporal as he is regularly demoted for bad behaviour and then promoted again). But perhaps even he isn’t quite what he seems. There is only one way to find out!
By turns trench narrative, ghost story, murder mystery and romance, I hope Where No Shadow Awaits will be unlike any First World War novel you’ve read before. It is launched on 5th September, available on Amazon now and can be found in good book shops.
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