Loss of Eden

The Loss of Eden trilogy follows the Rowland, Stratton and Gorse families through the First World War, moving between British society and the Western Front from 1914 to 1918. Across officers, industrial workers, wives and children, John Masters traces the way mass mobilisation, casualty, conscription and wartime labour erode the class assumptions with which the characters enter the conflict.

Now, God Be Thanked opens with the outbreak of war, Heart of War covers the grinding middle years including the Somme and Passchendaele, and By the Green of the Spring carries the families through the offensives and Armistice of 1918. Together the novels form a social as well as military history of Britain’s Great War experience.