Caroline Moorehead

Ashes to Ashes

All Our Worldly Goods

By

Chatto & Windus 204pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

As with Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky’s remarkable novel about the opening years of the Second World War, All Our Worldly Goods concerns itself with flight, the frenzied scramble for safety from advancing danger. Only here there are two flights: from the shelling in the Somme at the start of the First World War, and later from the German soldiers marching through Belgium and into Northern France in the early summer of 1940. Seen through the eyes of the Hardelots, a family of wealthy industrialists, the years from 1911 to 1940 (the span of this novel) were ones of panic, destruction, careful rebuilding and a new descent into chaos. 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'It would be nice to think that women will achieve equal pay in my lifetime, rather than to watch gloomily as stati… ,
    • In 1660, two of the signatories of King Charles I's death warrant fled across the Atlantic to New England. But were… ,
    • Howard Jacobson's sixteenth novel is 'a love story of sorts, one characterised not by physical desire or even conta… ,
    • 'The sudden immersion in the new and unfamiliar can lead people to write with a rare lack of self-consciousness' P… ,
    • 'Pools bend the rules. Clothes slip off, skin glistens, consciousness heightens. A dreamlike scenario unfolds' Jam… ,
    • 'Although he surely didn’t know W H Auden’s theory that every high C proclaims human freedom and our capacity to tr… ,
    • RT : With beginning tomorrow, we've uncovered a 1997 article from the archive reviewing 'Golf Dream… ,
    Follow Us