Eliza Graham's Blog

Just for today The One I Was is available for 99 cents.

amzn.to/1fsnTerThe One I Was

I'll be selling books at White Horse Show on 23-24 August 2014. http://whitehorseshow.co.uk/

Talking about my latest novel and writing career at Abingdon Library at 7.30pm on 24 September 2014.
https://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/cms/ev...

Talking about The One I Was at Wantage Betjeman Literary Festival at 11am on 29 October 2014.
http://www.wantagebetjeman.com/eliza-...

It seems that The One I Was is just 99p today on Amazon.co.uk. I don't know how long this situation will last, so if you want to pack a book for your holiday that's about family mysteries, history and English country house suspense, you might want to buy it for your Kindle.

http://amzn.to/1mf1UUHThe One I Was

With my 'Anna Lisle' writer's hat on, I just wanted to tell anyone who might be interested that Allegra will be just 99p at Amazon for two days starting tomorrow (20th) for anyone who hasn't yet read it. It's the story of how the legacy of a notorious English Romantic poet comes to haunt a London housewife who's also about to embark on a dangerous love affair.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Allegra-Anna-...

About two or three years ago I had it in mind to write a novel that would be (as usual) a thread of historical and contemporary storylines. An elderly Ukrainian living in Britain with a dark wartime secret. I gave up on it because it was so hard to uncover material about the Ukraine in the thirties and forties. The battles were described, of course. And the deaths. But it seemed that every single person who may have written down what everyday life was like in Ukraine in the period had been murdered/starved/deported or pressed into either the Fascist or Communist armies and militias. A country's culture is very certainly not that of the middle classes alone, but when those people have ... gone, it's hard to to written accounts. I simply thought that the subject was too difficult. In the last six months, of course, it's become very topical again, that historical split in the Ukraine, half of which looks west towards Poland and the EU, and the other part which looks east to Russia. I may have to start working on it, after all . . . Just need to track down some good accounts written by Ukrainian people in English or even German, which I can just about manage with my old German A level.

For two days, starting on Tuesday 27 May, The One I Was will be on a special promotional price of 99p.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-One-Was-E...

Meanwhile, Playing with the Moon is still just 59p on .co.uk.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Playing-With-...

Another really fascinating story about the work of Nicholas Winton in getting Jewish children out of Czechoslovakia just before World War 2, and his requests to the US for help in taking in children--ultimately unsuccessful in this case.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...

A review of The One I Was on Alex Blaugh's website, The Children's War. Alex is a former NYC school teacher (4th grade) who's working on an annotated bibliography of books written for young readers set in World War II which just keeps growing.


http://thechildrenswar.blogspot.co.uk...

I watched the last episode of Generation War last night and have been thinking about it ever since. It's good that the Germans have finally produced something like this*. I remember summer holidays spent with my German exchange friend and her brothers and sisters and their frustration with the wall of silence over the subject of WW2 and Germany. That was the late seventies and early eighties. Lots of terribly wounded men could still be seen going about their lives. Buses, trams and trains had signs reminding you that war wounded had priority seating rights.

There were some things about Generation War I didn't think quite worked (too much coincidence: Poland, the Ukraine and Russia are huge areas, yet the friends seemed to bump into one another, often almost literallly). I wasn't sure a Jewish friend would be so openly partying with four Aryan friends in 1941. And I thought that Wilhelm probably knew more than he let on about what was going on in Poland at the beginning of the series as he'd already served out there.

But the series gave me characters I cared about, even when they did things that appalled me (Charly informing on the Jewish doctor, Friedhelm shooting the little Jewish boy). They made me ask myself what I would have done in the same situations. Would I have been brave enough to have ignored the Jewish ancestry of my colleague? To have flat-out refused to shoot a child, even if I knew the immediate response would have probably been a bullet through my own head? What would I have done in those circumstances if I'd grown up indoctrinated on propoganda? I'll never know, of course.

In both Restitution and The One I Was the 'What would I have done?' question preoccupied me. Impossible to answer: we're not the same people as the Germans in the 30s and 40s. But we can still ask ourselves and try and listen to what the most truthful part of us offers up in response. Some of my answers haven't been very brave answers, despite my hoping that I would have done the right thing.The One I Was--Restitution


*I'm just editing this to add that I haven't forgotten, of course, Reitz's wonderful Heimat, which I first started watching because I wanted to research German kitchen interiors of the 1930s and which Google eventually led me to! The excuse of 'research' eventually became a bare-faced lie and I watched all of the first series in a kind of binge. I never liked the second and third series as much. For me, the story hung on Katharina and Maria, the matriarchs, and their centrality to the life of the community. Of course, war comes to Heimat but the village is certainly not on the Eastern Front and is reasonably peaceful untroubled, although there are those shaky moments when the American (fortunately not the Red Army) roll into the village in 1945. So it's not really a depiction of war in the same way as Generation War. Though I will never forget the scenes where Wilfried Wiegand shoots the downed British airman, only metres away from a car-ful of children, and where he tells off Katharina for giving the POWs a decent meal. And Katharina travelling into Bochum to rescue a young Lotti after her father was arrested. I must watch series one again. Brilliant.

Rosamond in The One I Was regards herself as 'a midwife for the dying'. Interesting to read this Guardian article about death doulas, people who walk beside those in the last stages of terminal illnesses. Some Marie Curie and Macmillan nurses I have met/heard of certainly seem to act as gentle guides through the last weeks of life. We all deserve to be gently eased into life and then gently eased through the process of dying, when it's time.

http://gu.com/p/3zp23/tw