The Empty Chair

Three years on, Edie Fletcher knows the Devon farm by heart — the broken gate, the animals, the weather coming in before there's anything to see in the sky. She can read the lane the way she once read the London market. She has stopped counting the days until she can go home, and she feels guilty about that, a little.

Her dad is far out on the Atlantic now, and his letters are the whole of her week. When one comes, the world is steady. When the days stretch and no letter comes, Edie listens to the shipping news on the wireless and makes small, silent bargains with the dark.

The war has got bigger. It reaches Devon every night through the crackle of the set, and it is coming closer to the people Edie loves — in London, at sea, and around the farm kitchen table itself.