Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave review – lives transformed by war

The author of the bestselling The Other Hand turns historical novelist but retains his power to locate the personal in the political

‘Skill and empathy’: Chris Cleave’s fourth novel was inspired by the lives of his grandparents. Photograph: James Emmett

Hannah Beckerman

Sunday 17 April 2016 - The Observer

Chris Cleave is one of those novelists you may well have heard of, whether or not you’ve read any of his books. His eerily prescient debut, Incendiary – narrated by a widow who has lost both her husband and young son in a terror attack orchestrated by Osama bin Laden – was published on the day of the 7/7 bombings in London. His second novel, The Other Hand, about the harrowing experiences of a 16-year-old Nigerian girl and her interactions with a middle-class London family, became an international bestseller in the summer of 2009. And his third novel, Gold, published on the eve of the London Olympics, told the story of three cyclists preparing for the 2012 Games.

What Cleave’s first three novels share is a timeliness, an immersion in the political and social issues and events that have shaped the past decade. It is a departure, therefore, that Cleave’s fourth, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, is a historical novel set in London and Malta during the second world war. The story is, Cleave discloses in an author’s note, inspired by the lives of his grandparents: his maternal grandfather served in Malta, and his paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the blitz. But dig below the surface of this novel, and Cleave is back in familiar thematic territory, exploring the ways that external events beyond the individual’s control influence the private lives of his characters, with either devastating or transformative consequences.

More

Footnote: I am reading this presently. It is a great piece of writing, and a most moving.tale.