No Man’s Land
From the slums of London to the riches of an Edwardian country house; from the hot, dark seams of a Yorkshire coalmine to the exposed terrors of the trenches, Adam Raine’s journey from boy to man is set against the backdrop of a society violently entering the modern world.Adam Raine is a boy cursed by misfortune. His impoverished childhood in the slums of Islington is brought to an end by a tragedy that sends him north to Scarsdale, a hard-living coalmining town where his father finds work as a union organizer. But it isn’t long before the escalating tensions between the miners and their employer, Sir John Scarsdale, explode with terrible consequences.In the aftermath, Adam meets Miriam, the Rector’s beautiful daughter, and moves into Scarsdale Hall, an opulent paradise compared with the life he has been used to before. But he makes an enemy of Sir John’s son, Brice, who subjects him to endless petty cruelties for daring to step above his station.When love and an Oxford education beckon, Adam feels that his life is finally starting to come together – until the outbreak of war threatens to tear everything apart.
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SIMON TOLKIEN
NO MAN’S LAND
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Copyright © Simon Tolkien 2016
The extract at the beginning of Part Five is copyright Siegfried Sassoon, by kind permission of the Estate of Siegfried Sassoon.
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com
A catalogue copy of 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, down-loaded, 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.
Source ISBN: 9780008100469
Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008100476
Version: 2017-09-01
‘Vivid set pieces, notably a wonderful section down a mine, while Adam is an intriguing central character: clever, sincere and, amid the turbulence of early twentieth-century England, a determined survivor.’ Daily Mail
‘Simon Tolkien’s most ambitious work yet … Adam makes an attractive hero and his story has more than enough colour and energy to keep us reading.’ Sunday Times
‘In this emotionally charged novel, Tolkien brings to the fore the social injustice, poverty and attrition of war in early twentieth-century England. The scenes underground in the mines of Scarsdale are every bit as shocking as the harrowing descriptions of trench warfare when Adam and his comrades are repeatedly sent over the top.’ Sunday Express
‘A bittersweet coming-of-age tale … Peopled with a rich cast of sympathetic characters.’ The Straits Times
‘A page-turner, an opera, a costume drama to binge watch. Simon Tolkien knows how to keep a story moving, and he does it well.’ NPR
‘Rends the heart and sears the soul … A splendid novel that exemplifies historical fiction at its descriptive, disturbing, addictive and engaging best.’ Richmond Times-Dispatch
‘Tolkien draws from the World War I-era experiences of his famous grandfather J.R.R. Tolkien to spin a saga worthy of Masterpiece Theater.’ Kirkus Reviews
This book honours the memory of my grandfather, J.R.R. Tolkien, who fought on the Somme between July and October 1916.
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Islington, London, 1900
Part Six : The Parting of the Ways
Chapter Thirty-Eight: February 1919
‘I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.’
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1929
The first world Adam knew was the street. It came to him through his senses without mental dilution, filling up his head with sounds and smells and images that he couldn’t begin to unravel. Lying in bed at night with his eyes closed he could see Punch and Judy bludgeoning each other with rolling pins, just as if they were right there in front of him. Down they went and up they came, again and again: gluttons for punishment. He knew that Benson, the rag-and-bone man with the blue scar across his chin, was pulling the strings behind the tattered red curtain but that didn’t make the garishly painted puppets any less real. Just thinking about them made him laugh until his insides hurt, in the same way that he laughed years later in the bioscope when he saw Charlie Chaplin with his bow legs and stick and black moustache, marching confidently up the road towards his next disaster.
