What inspired you to write about these characters? Anna Hope responds Thank you! I knew I wanted to write about three women from early on to explore a breadth of female experience - those like Evelyn who were born in the last decade of the 19th Century, who felt as though their youth, and the men they might have loved, had been stolen from them. Linda Arnold asks You have such empathy for each character’s loss and the way each grows toward resolution. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. I was deeply moved and compelled - it was a national moment that I knew next to nothing about. Then I started to read more about the Unknown Warrior: how many thousands of people had waited on the cliffs of Dover to see the ship bringing the coffin back to Britain, the thousands that lined the train tracks from the Kent coast to London, standing in the rain, waiting for a glimpse of the carriage as it flashed by, and then the hundreds of thousands who came to pay their respects to the body on its final journey from Victoria to Westminster Abbey. There must have been such a lack of closure - of the ordinary, comforting rituals of death. How easy would it have been to visit them? It cost £6 to visit the battlefields on a tour in 1919 - prohibitively expensive for most people. I started to think of how it must have been if your brother, or lover or father was buried in one of those graveyards, or was a name on one of those monuments. I hadn’t realized up until that point that the government took the decision not to bring any of the bodies back home. The idea for weaving my story around that of the Unknown Warrior came after a visit to the battlefields in Northern France: When I saw the graveyards with all of their thousands of crosses, and the monuments to those who had no known grave.

Lisa Lewis asks Do you have a personal connection to the Unknown Warrior or to the First World War, generally? Anna Hope responds Well, I grew up with my father playing ballads like The Green Fields of France and The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, so I had a sense of the great losses of the First World War from a very early age. Lisa Klug Toronto Colleen Wadsworth Calgary Jane MacLean Thornhill, Ont. Susan Gottman Montreal Rosalind Callard London, Ont. The Readers: Kim Covert Ottawa Edie Paul Kitchener, Ont. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.

Wake by Anna Hope