The Restless Wave - Sarah Meyrick

The Restless Wave is told from the perspectives of teacher Nell, her complicated mother Hope and her D-Day Army Chaplain grandfather Edward. 

Nell’s part in the story begins when she makes a BIG mistake by posting a social media comment which rapidly wrecks her life.  (I’m not sure I’d have realised that a child’s name of Kar-ian would be pronounced ‘Kardashian’ rather than ‘Carrie-Anne’ either!)  

We first meet Hope in 1945, an evacuee child about to be torn from the Dorset countryside she loves, to move to Birmingham with a father she barely knows and who is scarred both physically and mentally by the war.  

Meanwhile, Edward’s story is woven in and out of both Nell and Hope’s.  We follow him from childhood in colonial India to his ordination training which will lead from an Oxford curacy to the French beaches of D-Day, and beyond.  

 

This is a complex, multi-layered book. The story (‘stories’?) is engrossing and I was eager to find out what happened next for each of the characters, and to find out the resolution of the mystery of the letter and photograph Nell finds in an old desk.  There is some swearing, and a rather nasty incident at Edward’s school.  The latter is a pity as I couldn’t see that it added anything to the rest of the story.  However, it’s a couple of paragraphs in what is otherwise an excellent book.