The Soldier’s Wife by Joanna Trollope - review by Christena Appleyard

Christena Appleyard

Trouble on the Home Front

The Soldier’s Wife

By

Doubleday 320pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
 

It is Joanna Trollope’s bad luck that the subject of her new novel has also been covered by a recent successful BBC documentary, which in turn led to an avalanche of newspaper publicity and culminated in a song that reached number one in the Christmas charts. But she is an author who relies on zeitgeisty subjects. On this occasion Gareth Malone and his choir of military wives have got there first and exposed many of her readers to their heartbreaking stories.

Of course a novel provides the opportunity for a more nuanced account of the plight of the army wife than a TV show or a pop song. Unfortunately, The Soldier’s Wife doesn’t always pull this off, though there are parts of this book which demonstrate that Trollope’s control of plot

Sign Up to our newsletter

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

Follow Literary Review on Twitter