This event is frankly a long time coming, occurring at about the halfway point of an almost 300-page novel. The novel asks the great questions of life, and it affirms the healing power of nature and art–and love. I don't know if the somnambulant style was supposed to mimic the waterscape of this part of the world, but it seemed to work, and I really felt the halfway mark a reasonable place to leave this. A lot of this, whether written from the mindset of the aged narrator or the naive young girl on the train to Lincolnshire, fails to ring true. Photograph: Joe Rey/Alamy View image in fullscreen ‘An evocative landscape, lonely and bleak’ … the Fens in Flatlands.

My interest, however, did grow just before Book 2 starts halfway through when Philip and Freda are brought together by an injured goose. The two find each other when caring for an injured goose and together make decisions about their future. He is from a well to do family, but has his own ghosts and problems that he's escaping from, not least being a conscientious objector. This is a beautifully poignant retelling by Sue Hubbard of Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose, a parable of the saving grace and regenerative power of love and friendship, exploring the fundamental questions of life, amidst the backdrop of the horrors of WW2. Philip is an artist and a conscientious objector living in a remote lighthouse on the shores of the Wash.

Philip’s storyline covers his life from his early childhood and details the events that led to his reclusive life in the Fens, his conflicted feeling about war and violence, his stance as a pacifist and conscientious objector and how the events of WWII impact the same. What is beautifully developed, however, is the question of how we might live without religion or war-mongering.

There, deprived of any warmth, she meets a young man - Philip Rhayader -a conscientious objector who has left Oxford and his prospective vocation in the church following a nervous breakdown. I also feel as though the setting was very descriptive/specific, to the point where it could lose someone who's unfamiliar with the whereabouts of cities or places in England. A World War II novel family rooted in the countryside of East Anglia around Kings, Lynn and Wisbech, this story tales of a young girl, evacuated from wartime London to the countryside. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual.But having spent so much on the exposition, I wanted to know much more of Freda’s life from surviving the stress and squalor of being an unwanted evacuee to her life in a care home 75 years later. Philip and Freda are outsiders, one by his choice of pacifism and the other by her circumstances, who struggle to survive as WW2 breaks out in Europe. For survivors, memories of the wartime years have become “a patchwork of events etched across our hearts”, thinks Freda.

But this friendship is broken when Philip overcomes his pacifist objections, steals a small boat and sails to assist the evacuation from Dunkirk. Flatlands is the story of two people who are lifted out of their normal lives and find themselves on the bleak, flat Fens of the northern coast of England as the country girds itself for war with Germany in 1939. She was small and plain and unclaimed until taken by a poor family, a family that worked hard just to survive, a family without the luxury of love.

The read to me was reminiscent of All The Light We Cannot See or Atonement as well as books by Claire Keegan.