Penguin Modern Classics: When Blackbirds Sing

At the outbreak of the first world war, Dominic Langton leaves his wife Helena on their remote Australian farm to enlist in the British army. In England he meets up again with his ex-fiancee Sylvia, now married and the sophisticated mistress of the elegant life of the landed aristocracy, who only grudgingly accept Dominic. He is sent to the Western Front and the brutal reality of war forces him to question the involvements of his past. Yet he is to find no comfortable home for the values hard-won from this painful reassessment, neither in cultured old England, nor in stalwart new Australia, where Helena awaits him.