Read Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave….

Littsburgh is thrilled to be able to share with you the following excerpt from Everyone Brave is Forgiven, the “insightful, stark, and heartbreaking” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) novel about three lives entangled during World War II from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Little Bee.

Cleave will be visiting Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures on May 13th – get your tickets while they last!

Event information…

 

War was declared at 11:15 and Mary North signed up at noon. She did it at lunch, before telegrams came, in case her mother said no. She left finishing school unfinished. Skiing down from Mont-Choisi, she ditched her equipment at the foot of the slope and telegraphed the War Office from Lausanne. Nineteen hours later she reached St Pancras, in clouds of steam, still wearing her alpine sweater. The train’s whistle screamed. London, then. It was a city in love with beginnings.

She went straight to the War Office. The ink still smelled of salt on the map they issued her. She rushed across town to her assignment, desperate not to miss a minute of the war but anxious she already had. As she ran through Trafalgar Square waving for a taxi, the pigeons flew up before her and their clacking wings were a thousand knives tapped against claret glasses, praying silence. Any moment now it would start – this dreaded and wonderful thing – and could never be won without her.

What was war, after all, but morale in helmets and Jeeps? And what was morale if not one hundred million little conversations, the sum of which might leave men brave enough to advance? The true heart of war was small talk, in which Mary was wonderfully expert. The morning matched her mood, without cloud or equivalence in memory. In London under lucent skies ten thousand young women were hurrying to their new positions, on orders from Whitehall, from chambers unknowable in the oldmarble heart of the beast. Mary joined gladly the great flow of the willing.

The War Office had given no further details, and this was a good sign. They would make her a liaison, or an attaché to a general’s staff. All the speaking parts went to girls of good family. It was even rumoured that they needed spies, which appealed most of all since one might be oneself twice over.

Mary flagged down a cab and showed her map to the driver. He held it at arm’s length, squinting at the scrawled red cross that marked where she was to report. She found him unbearably slow.

‘This big building, in Hawley Street?’

‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘As quick as you like.’

‘It’s Hawley Street School, isn’t it?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. I’m to report for war work, you see.’

‘Oh. Only I don’t know what else it could be around there but the school. The rest of that street is just houses.’

Mary opened her mouth to argue, then stopped and tugged at her gloves. Because of course they didn’t have a glittering tower, just off Horse Guards, labelled ‘Ministry of Wild Intrigue’.

Naturally they would have her report somewhere innocuous. ‘Right then,’ she said. ‘I expect I am to be made a school mistress.’

The man nodded. ‘Makes sense, doesn’t it? Half the schoolmasters in London must be joining up for the war.’

‘Then let’s hope the cane proves effective against the enemy’s tanks.’

She taught them mathematics before lunch and composition after, hoping that a curtain would finally be whisked away; that her audition would give way to her recruitment. When the bell rang for the end of the day she ran to the nearest post office and dashed off an indignant telegram to the War Office, wondering if there’d been some mistake.

There was no mistake, of course. For every reproach that would be laid at London’s door in the great disjunction to come – for all the convoys missing their escorts in fog, for all the breeches shipped with mismatched barrels, for all the lovers supplied with hearts of the wrong calibre – it was never once alleged that the grand old capital did not excel at letting one know, precisely, where one’s fight was to begin.

Excerpted from Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave. Reprinted with permission from Simon & Schuster.