James Hilton, author of Goodbye, Mr Chips and Lost Horizon, was a best-selling author of his day (the 1930s to the 1950s) but, like so many popular writers, his writing is ignored by the literary establishment, dismissed as the sentimental harking back to a lost pre-lapsarian or at least pre-Great-War England. It’s not true. What his work is, rather, is an examination, through carefully crafted stories, of the trauma of the Great War and the presentiment of the greater war coming soon. Not all writers working in the interregnum between the wars sensed that there would be another conflict; most wrote on oblivious to the gathering storm. Whether Hilton was consciously aware of this, or simply sensed it, I do not know, but the foreboding of the future is there even while the characters in this story deal with the long aftermath of the First World War.

The story moves between points of view, starting in the first person with a graduate student meeting Charles Rainier, an eminent figure in politics and business, but then switches to the third person as we learn that Rainier served in the Great War, was injured and lost his memory, waking up two years later in Liverpool having completely forgotten what happened in those lost years. Rainier returns to his family and, while curiously detached, he helps save the family business, saving many livelihoods, and enters politics, all from a basic sense of doing his best but with an underlying void and loss.

The story is essentially about Rainier’s rediscovery of what happened to him during his lost years and the twist at the end is beautifully engineered. It’s a subtle, moving story about loss and recovery, written before anyone had come up with the term post-traumatic stress disorder by a writer from a generation that had more right to be stressed than any other in history.