Six books centered around military conflict and its aftermath

Mary Paulson-Ellis lives in Edinburgh. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow and was awarded the inaugural Curtis Brown Prize for Fiction in 2009 and the Literature Works First Page Prize in 2013. Her debut novel, The Other Mrs Walker was a Times bestseller and Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year. Paulson-Ellis was Highly Commended as a Rising Star in the DIVA Literary Awards and shortlisted as a Breakthrough Author in the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2017. In 2016 she was named an Amazon Rising Star.

The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing is her second novel.

For Waterstones, Paulson-Ellis tagged six top titles centered around military conflicts and their aftermath, including:

War and Turpentine
Stefan Hertmans

This poignant novel returns us to the territory where I began – WW1. It contains at its heart an outstanding piece of recreated memoir based on a diary Hertmans’ grandfather wrote about his experiences with the Belgian army in 1914-18. But Hertmans’ modern reflection on war and memory is so much more than that, taking in everything from his grandfather’s youth of almost Dickensian poverty in Ghent, to memories of an old man crying over a painting in the 1970s. A supremely moving ‘detective’ story about what it means to excavate the past.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue