A novel by Susan Hill.

Strange Meetings provides a highly original account of the War Poets of 1914-1918, written through a series of actual encounters, or near-encounters, from Siegfried Sassoon's first, blushing meeting with Rupert Brooke over kidneys and bacon at Eddie Marsh's breakfasts before the war, through famous moments like Sassoon's encouragement of Owen when both are in hospital at the same time; on to the poignant meeting between Edward Thomas's widow and Ivor Gurney in 1932; and the last, strange lunch and 'longish talk' of Sassoon and David Jones in 1964, half a century after the great war began. Among the other poets and writers we encounter are Vera Brittain, Roland Leighton, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Nichols and Edmund Blunden. Ricketts's unusual approach allows him to follow their relationships, marking their responses to each other's work and showing how these affected their own poetry - one potent strand, for example, is the profound influence of Brooke, both as a model to follow and a burden to reject. The stories become intensely personal and vivid - we come to know each of the poets, their family and intellectual backgrounds and their very different personalities. And while the accounts of individual lives achieve the imaginative vividness of a novel, they also give us an entirely fresh sense of Georgian poetry, conveying all the excitement and frustration of poetic creation, and demonstrating how the whole notion of what poetry should be 'about' became fractured and changed for ever by the terrible experiences of the war.

Old and new, here is a selection from Saros Cowasjee's short fiction written over the years. It includes his very first short story, 'My Shikari's Wife', which touches the heart with its tenderness, and his most recent, 'The Dog Who Died', about an animal's sacrifice which recalls that of the Saviour. In between these two are other unforgettable stories: 'His Father's Medals', a poignant reminder of the world of the untouchables; 'Another Train to Pakistan', about people who find themselves homeless through absence of roots and loyalties; and 'The Sentry', in which two brothers meet in the jungles of Burma as enemies belonging to different camps. Cowasjee is a cosmopolitan who is equally at home in London and Dublin as he is in Agra or Regina. His 'Sunday on a Soapbox' is a delightful portrayal of speakers who frequent Hyde Park Corner, while his Dublin pieces show how much of the Irish he has absorbed into himself. But at heart he is Indian, as the chance encounter with another Indian reveals in 'Strange Meeting', among the most memorable of his stories.

“The very content of Owen’s poems was, and still is, pertinent to the feelings of young men facing death and the terrors of war.” —The New York Times Book Review Wilfred Owen was twenty-two when he enlisted in the Artists’ Rifle Corps during World War I. By the time Owen was killed at the age of 25 at the Battle of Sambre, he had written what are considered the most important British poems of WWI. This definitive edition is based on manuscripts of Owen’s papers in the British Museum and other archives.

Building upon his earlier book The Death of the German Cousin (1986), renowned author Peter Edgerly Firchow focuses Strange Meetings on major modern British writers from Eliot to Auden and explores the development of British conceptions and misconceptions of Germany and Germans from 1910 to 1960.