So Much Life Left Over

Rosie and Daniel have moved to Ceylon with their little daughter to start a new life at the dawn of the 1920s, attempting to put the trauma of the First World War behind them, and to rekindle a marriage that gets colder every day.

However, even in the lush plantation hills it is hard for them to escape the ties of home and the yearning for fulfilment that threatens their marriage. Back in England, Rosie's three sisters are dealing with different challenges in their searches for family, purpose and happiness.

These are precarious times, and they find themselves using unconventional means to achieve their desires. Around them the world is changing, and when Daniel finds himself in Germany he witnesses events taking a dark and forbidding turn.

By turns humorous and tragic, gripping and touching, So Much Life Left Over follows a cast of unique and captivating characters as they navigate the extraordinary interwar years both in England and abroad. Echoing the focus on war and its aftermath that De Bernierès evoked in his global bestseller Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, this is a novel of lives changed and re-cast by time and circumstance. As the Scotsman writes, this is ‘a richly enjoyable, agreeably old-fashioned… unusual novel’ that holds readers through the twists and turns of a changing world. ‘I would guess that many readers, once they have launched themselves into it, will read it straight through, forgetting whatever it was they should have been doing instead of reading’.