I dedicated this, my first novel, to my nephews, rejoicing that they were of a generation who, unlike those in my story, and in the first half of the twentieth century, would never be called upon to die or kill for their country.

...But even if one could, with difficulty, accept that death may occur in the wrong order – the child before the parent from accident or illness (my mother died in her early 60’s my step-sister in her early 40’s) – it was unthinkable that any member, loved and important to the whole, would want to leave it.

...At first, every day, I cycled through normality, even bright productivity, to tearful bursts of emotion, to a physical ache, an intense wish that it wasn’t true, to, perhaps above all, anxiety with a world exposed as more dangerous, more arbitrary than any of us want to accept. ... I felt (selfishly) inadequate and frightened at being unable to make it better for my younger brother in the bleak place he found himself in as a father who has lost his boy in such tragic circumstances, or my much younger, former Pollyanna of a sister.

...We are born, most of us, in a fortunate age, we expect our children to be safe, and fiction is one way in which we can explore emotional pain, the random assaults of fate and the not quite unthinkable.

...The tracks were chosen by my nephew on a list left as part of his immaculate planning for death: “I can’t make you love me”, “Hey there, Delilah” - songs chosen, we saw, from a CD called The Very Best of Sad Songs - even at the darkest times there are fragments of humour.