Description: Helen Simonson, author of The Summer Before The War and Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.
Welcome to my web site. I am Helen Simonson, author of the New York Times and international bestseller, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand and now the proud author of a second novel, The Summer Before the War. Both are set in Sussex, England, where I lived as a teenager. I love Sussex, but as a young woman, I could not wait to go to college in London, or to move three thousand miles away to America. I began writing as a young mother desperate for some small intellectual escape, and published my first book at the
East Sussex, 1914. It is the end of England’s brief Edwardian summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful. Formidable local matriarch, Agatha Kent, has just risked her reputation by publicly pushing for the appointment of a female Latin teacher but when Beatrice Nash arrives, with one trunk and several large crates of books, she is not as old or as meek as expected. As Beatrice navigates the strictures of small town life, an unimaginable war looms. The true limits of progress, a
"So vividly drawn it fairly vibrates...nothing short of a treasure." - Paula McClain, The Paris Wife and Circling The Sun