Tallie's War — Jan Webster

Starting just before the First World War, Jan Webster's novel plunges the Candish family and its fearsome widowed matriarch Janet, into a physical and moral maelstrom, bringing the reader out the other side into a peace where everything is utterly changed.

Women striving towards the vote are breaking away from the old subservience: Tallie Candish, previously victimized at home, finds the courage to take up her nursing vocation; Kate, stigmatized as plain and blue stocking, to make a bid for love, and Belle to make the choice between new-found independence and a loving commitment.

As for the Candish brothers and Wilfred Chappell, the young English teacher who comes into the household as boarder and catalyst, the carnage of the Western Front catapults them towards testing frontiers that they had never dreamt of, and changes more profound than they could ever have envisaged.

Tallie Candish fights her own personal war for love and self-respect in this family saga of young people struggling with the problems of love, courage and redemption in a time of unprecedented upheaval…