A Sense of Things Beyond

by Renée Belliveau

A gorgeous work of literary historical fiction exploring what is commemorated and what is forgotten in times of war, from the ReLit-nominated author of The Sound of Fire.

Only the names of those unable to speak are honoured. Only the names of those long silenced, those who could never rise to refute the distorted narrative, are preserved in stone.

In the aftermath of the First World War, two souls struggle to find their place in a world they no longer recognize. Rose, a nurse who tended to the wounded near the frontlines, has returned to her quiet life in Toronto to find that her family home no longer offers any comfort. Only a few years earlier, she reached France brimming with eagerness to contribute, but as she found herself healing soldiers only to send them back to the trenches, the senseless brutality of war became clear?especially once her nephew Leo enlisted.

Meanwhile, Frederick is trying to reclaim the thread of his life interrupted by war. On the verge of completing his PhD when Germany declared him an enemy alien, he spent the next four years languishing in an internment camp, where thousands of men from the British Empire crowded into unheated horse stables. But now he wonders if his anger at his unjust treatment was misdirected.

Their paths cross as each is trying to bridge the chasm between who they once were and who they have become. As Rose and Frederick navigate the fragile promises of a new world, their shared sense of disillusionment becomes a language of its own. Might they find solace in each other?

Past and present intertwine in A Sense of Things Beyond, revealing how each shapes the other. It is a gorgeously written examination of what comes after war, and how we hold remembrance.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Canada

264 pages, Paperback

Published September 9, 2025

Reviews

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellently researched and written. I love a book, fiction or non-fiction, that reveals information about little-known people or events in history. I highly recommend this book.

[Joanne Gallant · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written book about secrets, family, and how to live in a post-World War I world. Poignant, immaculately researched, and full of characters I cared deeply about.
I love Renée’s lyrical and emotional writing.

[Samuelle Saindon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Puisque j'étais une personne dans le monde académique de l'histoire, et ma thèse de maîtrise suivait aussi des récits d'un côté de l'histoire canadienne de la PGM, j'étais immédiatement intrigué par les propos du livre à Renée, c'étais par chance que j'ai croisé Renée à Sackville, lorsqu'elle signait ses livres pour ceux et celles qui l'achetais :) J'aurais expliqué un peu de mon background aussi pour connecter, mais je devais partir.

J'adore du historical fiction, et ceci est parfait pour les gens qui veulent connaître plusieurs facettes méconnus des expériences vécus des gens canadiens durant la PGM.

Je sais pas trop comment expliquer ce que j'ai aimé du livre (je viens tout juste de le finir): les personnages - bien écrit, mais aussi dans le contexte des thèmes soulevés, des bons véhicules pour faire réaliser que l'après guerre n'était pas "sunshine and rainbows".

Malgré que les historiens d'aujourdhui le disent de moins en moins, l'histoire populaire que le Canada aime raconter encore (surtout le 11 novembre) est notre bravoure et etc. nous ont réunis comme "Canadiens" grâce à nos succès durant la PGM. Ceci n'est réellement pas la réalité, quelque chose que j'ai réalisé durant mes recherches de maîtrise en histoire, mais aussi quelque chose qui est super bien illustré ici, à travers la réalité vécue par les personnages principaux et Léo, personnage secondaire - javais des larmes dans mes yeux vers la fin,

quelle belle façon de réfléchir à TOUS les gens et la façon dont la guerre les a affectés...

Je peux voire que certaines personnes trouvent ce roman plus "lent", mais je trouve qu'il etait nécessaire, car Fred et Rose devaient ralentir et bien réfléchir/réfléter leurs passés, et comment honorer cela dans leur présent.

[Sue Slade · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review is coming soon.

[Carol McKnight · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful book that challenges the normal conception that Remembrance is all about the dead, or the lost.
Ruth and Frederick were involved in WW1, returning to Canada and feeling that their experiences are not recognised as being part of the war effort.
An interesting reflection of the internment camps for ‘enemy aliens’ in both Germany and Canada.
Nurses have never received their due for the incredible work they perform in war zones.

“Whose stories of war do we remember? Whose stories are considering worth remembering? Whose experiences have been eclipsed, left out of Memorialisation efforts? Whose voices have been forgotten or erased?”

A great contribution to the literature of historical fiction! Thank you, Renee.

[Kelly Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought provoking book that follows two people in the aftermath of WWI. Rose was a Canadian nurse in front line hospitals in France and Belgium. Frederick had lived in Germany for several years working on his PhD when that country deemed him to be an "enemy alien" and locked him in horse stalls at Ruhleben for the duration of the war, learning too late "how swiftly the veneer of civility had crumbled. How quickly war made enemies out of friends."
Both Rose and Frederick return to Canada, to rural Nova Scotia, to try and make sense of it all in a world that wants to glorify the war and to decide who is worthy of remembrance. "She watched the war being reduced to stone monuments and polished speeches, it was clear that her role, and the roles of so many others, had been conveniently forgotten."
My own grandfather was wounded in WWI at Lens in France, shot in the knee. He went thru a clearing station, a field hospital, then to Paris for surgery before being sent to England to recuperate and eventually return home. I guess he was lucky to not have been just patched up and sent back to the trenches. He walked with a stiff leg the rest of his life which I'm sure prevented him from doing a number of things. But a soldier who lost a foot would scoff at my grandfather's injury, thinking it was nothing compared to his loss. At the same time a soldier who lost an entire leg would look at that same soldier and think he should consider himself lucky that he only lost a foot. And is a young man lying dead in a trench from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head any less a victim of the war than the soldier lying next to him with a German bullet in his head? Questions like these plague Rose and Frederick as communities large and small grapple with how to properly honour the Glorious Dead who so bravely sacrificed themselves on the altar of the Great War.
One scene in particular made my blood boil. It was at one such committee meeting where Rose had been asked to attend as someone privy to what the soldiers had been through. A disgustingly odious Major-General vehemently derides her for assuming to know anything about the conditions that soldiers faced as she had simply been "on the sidelines". I wanted to scream 'exactly where were you in relation to the front line Major-General, EXACTLY??" I wager that the nurses in the clearing stations and the field hospitals, as Rose was, were far more privy to the human costs of the war! But then it is always the politicians and the military brass who get to make the decisions from a position of safety that affect the men and women with the mud and the blood on their hands and the fear in their hearts.
I like how we see the change the war wrought upon society, forever banishing many of the customs that had held women in a choke-hold before. Canadian nurses were allowed to vote from the battlefields of Europe in 1917 as members of the armed forces (of note, Canada was the only country to give its service nurses a military rank) and after the war new social norms made it perfectly acceptable for Rose and Frederick to spend a day together without a chaperone.
Both Rose's and Frederick's narrative move back and forth between the present, 1922, and the war years, easily discerned by the change in form from third-person present to the more traditional third-person past. Much like both characters are learning to live in two different worlds, both with a desire to tell a story. Frederick tells Rose "This idea of enemies, defined purely by race or class, this division between 'our kind' and the rest – it's a fabrication. A story we tell ourselves. The myth of our being one, as a nation, it means we exclude others. I've experience that exclusion. And I wanted to show society the other side of it."
I have only one negative note about this book and it is one that I would expect to give to an author from away, NOT a native Maratimeer. The story is set along the Minas Basin in Nova Scotia at the head of the Bay of Fundy home to the highest tides in the world. The author repeatedly refers to it as "the sea". It is NOT a sea nor is it ever referred to as such by anyone living along its shores. One would 'swim in the bay' (if they are crazy because it is COLD), 'look out over the bay', etc but NEVER "the sea"!! If the author had not specified the Minas Basin, the fossils (for which the area is famous), and the tides, I would have assumed the book was set along the Atlantic shore somewhere based on the reference to "the sea". This was one of those fingernails-on-a-chalkboard things for me every time the incorrect reference was made.
The final paragraph in the book, the ending to an Author's Note full of reference material really hits home with the gist of this book: "I hope this book adds, in some small way, to the on-going conversation about whose histories we preserve and whose we allow to fade. If the past is a story we tell ourselves, it is only by probing how it was shaped that we can begin to understand the world we've inherited." This was a 4½ star read for me.

[Paul Wagenbreth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Renee Belliveau’s “A Sense of Things Beyond,” with its particular take on that ghastliest of charnel houses, the first World War, ineluctably makes its way toward a shocking revelation which, while not the surprise for me that it might be for other readers – the novel’s all-along caginess about it gave the game away for me – nevertheless puts a final devastatingly personal stamp on the war’s horrors – horrors reminiscent for me, with the trauma they make for the medical professionals attending to them, of a superb British TV series of a few years back, “The Crimson Field.”
Any number of times as I made my way through Belliveau’s novel I was put in mind of the series, which depicted several young British women assuming posts at a field hospital in France, with the one appreciable difference from the TV series being that in Belliveau’s novel the nurse protagonist, Rose Avery, is Canadian.
The litany of wounds she sees, though, the “mud, the blood, the boys crying for their mother, the blasted jaws,” could as well have come out of the series or, for that matter, any of the numerous movies or books about the war, with the horror of the casualties made the worse for their sheer staggering numbers.
Were such numbers even possible, Rose wonders about the “hundred and seventy, two hundred and twenty, three hundred and ten, five hundred, a thousand” cases they were seeing in less than a week,” with their assaults on every imaginable part of the human body: “three arms, two feet blown off; one spinal case, paralyzed; twenty pieces of shrapnel lodged in a single lacerated chest; two fractured knees, one pelvis broken clean through; four indiscernible faces, skin and cartilage turned to bloody pulps of tissue. All these injuries, and only nine men.”
Horrible, of course, all of them, and each with its own dreadful story, but particularly awful for Rose (and the reader) is one patient's account of how, with his foot shattered and assisting a comrade who’d been blinded, together they made a whole person who was able to make it away from where they'd been injured, only to have a shell explode near them, “and (the patient) reached for the other and shook his shoulders until he realized that his head was missing from his body.”
And, of course, worst of all, there was the gas: the “pale green colour” of it “approaching, quickly drifting on the wind. The sweet odour of pineapple and pepper reaching them before they could move. The horror it carried.… (how) they struggled to wake the men around them as they tried to retreat. Many never woke again.”
More than just experiencing the trenches through her patient’s accounts, though, Rose comes to an intimate personal knowledge of them when she is transferred to a clearing center just miles from the front, where “sodden earth sank under (her) feet as (she) hurried from one man to the next … . They did not even look like men, but pieces of men. Masses of limbs bundled in cloth painted deep red and rich brown. Bodies twisted and bent, skin of a petrified hue. War had broken them.”
As it will come to do for her, afflicting her with a case of trench fever that confines her to her bed with a raw throat, blinding headache and wet cough.
Not so horrific as Rose’s experiences but awful enough in their own right are those endured by the novel’s male principal, Frederick, a fellow Canadian who enrolls at a German university and is happy enough there, but with the advent of war he’s rounded up along with fellow expatriates and he can scarcely believe how differently he’s now regarded by Germans from whom he’d hitherto enjoyed congeniality, how “the same people who had not so long ago met his gaze with a smile, who had kindly retrieved his dropped scarf or borrowed his newspaper, now looked at him as though he were something vile, less than human. How swiftly the veneer of civility had crumbled.” (Among the degradations he and his fellows are subjected to as they’re herded along: a boy darting from the crowd, directly into his path, and eyes burning with venom and hands balled into fists, spitting “Englische Schweinehund!”)
Nowhere near so dreadful as the trenches, though, are the living accommodations accorded to him and his fellows by their captors. Still, foul enough they are that Frederick refrains from getting too specific about their details in letters home: “He did not mention the rats that scurried through the barracks while he tried to sleep, nor the worms he had found in his soup the previous day. He did not mention the itch on his scalp or the rash on his hands. He did not mention the furry feeling of his teeth or the lice he had found in his pubic hair when he had been marched to the public showers for his biweekly wash.”
Foul enough, too, are his circumstances that he contracts the other scourge of the war, the so-called Spanish flu, which with its lethality along with that of the fighting put me in mind of another recent novel in which the flu also figured prominently along with the war, Howard Norman’s “Come to the Window” (almost as horrific as war, Rose thinks as she tends to the flu after the war).
Of course Rose and Frederick will come together in a romance which to my mind ended on just the right poignant note at the end of the actual body of the novel – reminiscent it was for me of “A Farewell to Arms” – but which the novel backed off from in an epilogue which to my mind seemed superfluous or even flirted with blunting the overall realistic thrust of the novel. But that could just be my jaded disinclination toward happy endings, just as it might have been my lifelong congenital difficulty with keeping characters straight in novels that made it hard for me at the beginning to get down the relationships in Belliveau’s book.
Nevertheless, her novel is a compelling depiction of a vehemently xenophobic period discomfortingly like our own, when an uncaring administration is packing off undocumented immigrants to detention camps in their way even worse than Frederick’s (no alligators, anyway, waiting to devour the book’s escapees) and making especially timely Frederick’s sentiment deploring the “patent absurdity” of hating “people because they live round the corner and speak a different vernacular.”

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and Nimbus Publishing for a free ARC copy in exchange for my honest opinion. I loved the plot of this book and felt the author did a wonderful job diving deep into the past and exploring pieces of history I was unfamiliar with. I knew women had been unfairly treated and dismissed as "not really serving" despite providing medical care in wars, but I didn't know the depth of it and I was also unfamiliar with the internment camps Germany used for civilians in WW1. The information that can be found online is fairly sparse and doesn't go into the detail the author does. I learned a lot.

Unfortunately I am impatient and found the pace in the beginning slow, Rose's treatment of Anna disappointing, and I was too impatient to wait until nearly the end to find out what happened to Leo, which is why I didn't enjoy the book very much. These are all signs that my review of the book are a "me" problem, not due to anything wrong with the book, and I think someone who likes historical fiction and is more patient than I am will enjoy it greatly.

[B.R. Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Told in compelling alternating points of view during and after the First World War, A Sense of Things Beyond takes the reader on an emotionally poignant journey. We follow Rose, a front-line nurse who grapples with the ethics of treating wounded soldiers only to have them return to battle; and Frederick, a prisoner of a civilian German internment camp who is forced to endure a daily existence constructed from scraps of indignity.
 
Both return to Canada as shadows of their former selves, burdened by memories of dishonour and devastating secrets. But in each other they discover an unexpected ally, and glimmers of redemption. With delicate sensibility that cultivates hope Belliveau explores the lasting trauma of war with profound understanding and gentleness, creating a novel that is both heartbreaking and beautifully optimistic. A well-crafted triumph.

[Odette · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.6/5. Rose was a nurse during the war. She saw lots while helping wounded soldiers near the frontline.
Frederick was held in German camp in Ruhleben as an enemy alien among many others who were held prisoners in a horse stable.

They both return to their respective homes several years later following the war. Her sister is married to his brother. They reunite and talk about the war and how they can fit in this world again, how to cope,…

Negative: It was hard to follow the storyline as it went from back in the days of war to present, and vice versa. Also, the characters were lacking some substance as I was not into them. They seemed impersonal (maybe just my opinion).

Positive: The author did a lot of research on the subject as it showed in her work!! Bravo Renée 👏👏

[Ellen Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. What a beautiful story. I loved the jump between past and present. The way the 2 main characters had their lives intertwine was lovely. Every scene was described in detail to where I almost saw it playing out like a movie in front of me. This is an appropriate book for the state of the world right now and a reminder of the struggles of war and what comes after.

[Eleni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meditative and haunting, A Sense of Things Beyond explores two overlooked perspectives from the First World War and their disillusionment that followed. I really liked how the past and present intertwined throughout the novel and the exploration on how communities thought about holding remembrance in the years following the war. Frederick's story of spending four years in an internment camp in Germany was especially compelling.

[Ana Ahn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book approaches war in a calm and introverted way. The horror is presented in a shocking but reflective way. The love between the protagonists is portrayed in a melancholic setting.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

[senhoritatemporal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC provided in exchange for a honest review.

This book was bittersweet and very well researched, I loved the setting and the rawness of the characters, I am truly impressed.

[Miss Wuthering · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book, the vibe and story touched my heart so much. I will read it again someday.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

[JXR · Rating 4 out of 5]

literary, interesting, gorgeous historical literary work about the effects of the wars. the vibes were great. 4 stars. tysm for the arc.

[Enid Wray]

DNF

[Trudy Comeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read and a new perspective on some who were affected by WW II.