Give Us This Day — R.F. Delderfield

in the beloved classic God Is an Englishman saga “A heroic finale to the author's cavalcade of middle-class life.”

-- W. B. Hill, Best Sellers

Sweeping Adam Swann and three generations of his family into the tide of events that followed Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, this stirring novel confronts them, and England, with the social upheaval of a rapidly changing world. The same revolutionary ferment that stirs up labor unrest also births the English suffragette movement, taking the family idealist, Giles, to Parliament. With conflicting interests, two of his brothers usher the family's firm into the twentieth century and another Swann brother, Alex, a professional soldier, attempts to introduce an outmoded army to modern tactics. Like their aging father, these Swanns strive energetically to wed personal dreams to national values -- even as the rumble of the guns of August 1914 signals the end of the world as they and their country have known it.

Give Us This Day is a stirring saga of England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the social upheaval begins and the Great War looms, forever changing the landscape of England and her people.

“Mr. Delderfield's vast public will find here…his undimmed facility as a storyteller.”

-- The New Yorker

“Rich and rewarding, the sort of thing to read at leisure and peacefully. Moreover, it is authentic…It has the spirit of the times.”

-- Library Journal