World War I Books by Anne Perry

     Anne Perry's books enthrall me like no others.  I knew that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Serbia started WWI and that's about all I knew of that war until I started reading Perry's best-selling series.  

I love a good series.  Instead of putting down a mesmerizing book and having to forget the fictional characters, a series of books enables me to find the next book and read on about fictional people that have almost come alive for me.

I probably wouldn't have chosen to read about WWI or any war because war is so gruesome.  I am very patriotic but very anti-war.  You don't even want to get me started on that subject.  I read Anne Perry's first WWI book because I had already read many of her other books and loved, loved, loved them.  I knew I would enjoy No Graves As Yet (the first in the series) for the simple reason that I do not think Perry is capable of writing other than fascinating, readable, wonderful books.  She is brilliant, an author's author.

I enjoyed the first book because I learned about the war but also because it describes the characters so well.  The Reavley family of England is a passionate one.  They care deeply for one another and love their home and country.  Each of them plays a different role in the war.  Their courage and patriotism is tested in myriadways.  At the beginning of the war, Joseph Reavley is a chaplain at a college.  Matthew works for the British Secret Intelligence Service.  Their sister Judith becomes an ambulance driver.

Perry takes us right into the heart of the war.  In the fourth book of the series At Some Disputed Barricade she writes of the trenches from which the soldiers fought:  

    "It took him nearly half an hour to make his way to the forward trench.  The duckboards were awash, some floating knee-high in the filthy water.  Others were almost waist-high, clogged with the bodies of dead rats, garbage, and old tins.  The leg of a dead soldier stuck out from the gray clay of the wall.  There were patches of blue sky overhead, but Joseph was cold because he was wet to the skin." 

Could there be more descriptive words about the horror of war?

But Perry can also write vividly about what goes on in the hearts and minds of the men at war.  She describes Joseph Reavley's thoughts:

     "Joseph was overcome with a longing to talk to Matthew, to try to explain why looking at this land, these people, he could understand the dreams and the pain that had driven a man to want peace at any price.  The world in which right and wrong had seemed so obvious was gone like a bubble grasped at by a hand, disappeared in an instant."

The four books in the series so far are:  No Graves as Yet

                                                                Angels in the Gloom

                                                                Shoulder the Sky

                                                                At Some Disputed Barricade

Read them all.  Don't let the descriptions of war scare you.  These best-selling books contain ugliness but also beauty, truth and love of country and fellow man.