Bitter Harvest Moon

Years ago, browsing in a local junk shop, I found a photograph of a woman and two girls on Bridlington beach in the early 1900s. I was immediately taken by the girl on the left, who was wearing a white beret and holding up her long petticoats to paddle in the sea. I knew immediately that she was the character I had been searching for, the person that I wanted to write about.

Bitter Harvest Moon is set in Hull, London, and France, during the years before, during, and after the First World War. Emily's journey through these turbulent years, from childhood on that Bridlington beach to young adulthood after the war, is told from her point of view, and through the other main protagonists in the tale – Robert, a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, Eleanor, her radical suffragette aunt, and Fish, a young VAD nurse.

At home, conflicts over Emily's future and over the place of women in society occur in tandem with the wider European conflict, a conflict that her family members are tragically drawn into.

The background to the novel is meticulously researched, the characters becoming involved in both local and national historical events such as the first Zeppelin raid on Hull in 1915. The conventional narrative is interspersed with personal letters between the characters.

The girl in the photograph could never have foreseen the Great War or known how it would change her life so completely. Bitter Harvest Moon is Emily's story.