The Return of the Soldier
Rebecca West's 1918 novel sends Chris Baldry home from the Western Front with shell shock and a fifteen-year memory gap. He believes he is still in love with Margaret, a working-class woman from his youth, and has forgotten his wife Kitty entirely. West treats the love triangle as a class collision as much as a psychological wound, and the ending restores order at a cost the book does not pretend to forgive. Written while the war still raged, it carries the impatience of someone who has seen the old social contracts fail.The Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition keeps the novel in circulation with its familiar black-spine format and useful scholarly apparatus. A short, sharp book that deserves to be read alongside the war poetry of its moment.
