Up to now, my books have been mainly for children. But my new book is for adults – and here it is!
This book is very special to me. It’s a novel, rising out of my father’s experience as a prisoner of war – he was captured in May 1940 on the way to Dunkirk.
Like many former soldiers and victims of war, he didn’t talk very much about what had happened to him: when he did start to open up, it was mostly to share funny incidents and stories – like the one about a German guard who had formerly been a violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic, and used to stand under a tree playing an imaginary violin – so lost in his memories that when a senior officer came by, the POWs used to hand him his gun and tell him to smarten up.
Of course, it wasn’t all like that.
After he died, I decided to find out more about what had happened to him – to join the dots, as it were. You can read more about that process here. https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2026/01/an-ordinary-war-by-sue-purkiss.html Of course, there was an enormous amount I didn’t discover.
But there was enough to form a sort of a scaffold, and on that I built this story. It’s about a young man called Harry Pilgrim, who, like Dad, is captured on the way to Dunkirk. After a long and difficult March east, culminating in one of those dreadful train journeys, he faces the prospect of incarceration in a camp in Poland. He experiences deep friendships, but also betrayal: he falls in love with Zofi, but loses her in devastating circumstances. When he gets home, he does his best to forget all this. But many years later, as Poland emerges from the Soviet yoke, he receives a letter with a Polish postmark…
And in further news – I have a brand new Substack! It’s called Telling Tales, and this is how it works.Each week, I post a very short story, which I invite you to read along with a cup of your favourite tipple. The stories came about in this way: during lockdown, I set myself the task of writing a story each day on the back of a postcard. The story was inspired by the picture, and it had to be written straight off – no drafts. Since then, they’ve just been sitting in a box. So when I heard about Substack, I thought it was the perfect place to post them. Do take a look – just click on Telling Tales.
