Goodbye for Now: A breathtaking historical debut

Goodbye for Now: A breathtaking historical debut
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Two brothers, only one survives. As Europe is torn apart by war, two brothers fight very different battles, and both could lose everything… While George has always been the brother to rush towards the action, fast becoming a boy-soldier when war breaks out, Joe thinks differently. Refusing to fight, Joe stays behind as a conscientious objector battling against the propaganda.On the Western front, George soon discovers that war is not the great adventure he was led to believe. Surrounded by mud, blood and horror his mindset begins to shift as he questions everything he was once sure of.At home in Liverpool, Joe has his own war to win. Judged and imprisoned for his cowardice, he is determined to stand by his convictions, no matter the cost.By the end of The Great War only one brother will survive, but which?This breathtaking novel is perfect for fans of Jenny Ashcroft, Kate Furnival and Louisa Young.

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M J HOLLOWS was born in London in 1986, and moved to Liverpool in 2010 to lecture in Audio Engineering. With a keen interest in history, music, and science, he has told stories since he was little. Goodbye for Now is his first novel, which he started as part of his MA in Writing from Liverpool John Moores University, graduating in 2015. He is now researching towards a PhD in Creative Writing, and working on his next novel. Find out more about Michael at his website: www.michaelhollows.com.

Goodbye for Now

M J HOLLOWS


HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © M J Hollows 2018

M J Hollows asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008287962

Version: 2018-10-25

For everyone who fought and died in war,

and everyone who fought and died for peace.

They all stood in silence, with hats and caps doffed under arms, focusing their vision on their shoes. Meanwhile the bishop droned on in his fashion, extolling the virtues of sacrifice.

He stared with them, trying not to dredge up the memories of the past. I have lived through hell, but in that I am not alone, he thought. Bile stuck in his throat and he desperately tried to swallow it away. No one noticed, or if they did they attributed it to his grief.

Everyone had suffered and sacrificed, not just the soldiers. He wondered how his brother might be now. How much he would have been changed by the war. They had both endured their own private hells, and as the dead would keep their solace, so would the living. No one would ever truly understand their plight and those that had experienced it didn’t need the others to remind them. That was what the nightmares were for.

So he stood there, in silence, with their neighbours and people from the nearby streets, waiting for the bishop to finish his sermon, for the memorial to be revealed.

Somewhere in the distance a baby cried. No one reacted, empathising with the child, who was probably too young to know what was going on but was joining in nonetheless.

The bishop stopped and was replaced by a Major young enough to have been a junior Lieutenant at the outbreak of war. His voice broke as he began reading out the names of the lost, Morgan, Norris, Oliver, the endless torrent of the dead. They were just names now. Their legacy, the brass plaque that was being unveiled.

He patted his coat pocket, remembering the bundle of letters that he kept there. That’s where they would stay, sealed, but not forgotten.

The Major continued reading out the names of the fallen, some of whom he knew, others he had never met.

When he could bear to think of him, he had spent most of the war angry with his brother. Not angry, that wasn’t strictly the right emotion. They had never really understood each other. They were very different people, with different stories. He had had high hopes for his brother, they all had, yet he threw it all away. He chose his path. When he should have turned to his family he turned away. It was hard now to remember him as they were when they were children. Too much had happened. His name had not been spoken aloud since. They all missed him, but it was too painful a memory.

The Major had finished now and had disappeared. There was a cough from someone amongst the crowd. The only sound apart from that was the occasional sniffle of a nose or the sound of stifled weeping. Heads were still bowed and would remain that way for some time, some years perhaps.

At first he hadn’t understood his brother’s decision; they stood on opposite sides. But as the war dragged on and on, past its first Christmas and into a new year, year after year, he had started to understand his brother a lot more. He begun to understand the need to fight for something, to believe in something and to not give up. No matter what life would throw at you. That was a sentiment he could agree on, and he guessed it was something their father had managed to instil in them both, despite their differing opinions. It had been a clear dividing line at first, but things were less clear now. The world had changed for all of them. The horror of the war had left no family unaffected. They couldn’t change their decisions, but they could make sure that they counted for something. That things hadn’t just changed for the worse but would be allowed to change for the better too.



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