This book is about two soldiers that meet and become friends. Drum is a Ford factory worker from London. Carter went to Oxford and comes from a wealthy family. They are at a training center for nuclear weapons they have named, "Dooms Town." After they return to their other lives, Carter convinces Drum to change his life and become a farmer. He then has to convince his wife Gwen to make this change. Carter agrees to front the money on the property next to his house as long as he has his word that he will sell the property back to him if he leaves. The reader learns about Drum and Carter's kids and grandkids with their anxieties of war, their ups and downs. The book begins in the 50s and ends with the present time as they are old and reflect on their paths. It took me awhile to get interested in this book with the characters and then I couldn't put it down wondering what was next. Some of the parts brought back memories with the threat of nuclear bombs. I didn't like all the characters but I felt like I knew them well in the end.

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book. ( )

Story of a long-lasting friendship between two men, Drummond Moore and James Carter, who meet during their military service. They bond over shared experiences at Doom Town, a civil defense center that simulates situations related to nuclear war. They are from different classes and backgrounds. Drum works in a Ford factory near London. Carter is a wealthy landowner in northwest England. We follow their long-lasting friendship, relationships, marriages, and children from the late 1950s to the 2010s.

The plot is structured around worldwide events that induce fear, showing that just as one subsides, another takes over. The international events remain in the background, with the focus on the characters and their reactions. Evers brings fear down to the individual level. Carter and Drum plan to set up a bunker and stock it with end-of-civilization supplies. One of Drum’s primary motivations is keeping his family safe.

It is a slowly developing narrative. I enjoyed the literary writing style. The dialogue is particularly effective, though the prose is choppy in places. I appreciated the fictional news articles, inserted sporadically, that provide context for worldwide incidents and illuminate the characters’ stories from another perspective.

The premise of this book caught my attention. Evers examines fear, how it can permeate decisions, and the resulting harm to those we seek to protect. It seems like a pertinent topic for our times.

I received an advance reader’s copy from the publisher via NetGalley.
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Subtle, full of surprises, sympathetic characters, intergenerational story. That’s a perfect book to me. ( )

This book is about two soldiers that meet and become friends. Drum is a Ford factory worker from London. Carter went to Oxford and comes from a wealthy family. They are at a training center for nuclear weapons they have named, "Dooms Town." After they return to their other lives, Carter convinces Drum to change his life and become a farmer. He then has to convince his wife Gwen to make this change. Carter agrees to front the money on the property next to his house as long as he has his word that he will sell the property back to him if he leaves. The reader learns about Drum and Carter's kids and grandkids with their anxieties of war, their ups and downs. The book begins in the 50s and ends with the present time as they are old and reflect on their paths. It took me awhile to get interested in this book with the characters and then I couldn't put it down wondering what was next. Some of the parts brought back memories with the threat of nuclear bombs. I didn't like all the characters but I felt like I knew them well in the end.

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book. ( )

Drummond Moore and James Carter met in the late 1950s whilst doing their two years’ National Service. An early encounter, when Drum saves Carter from losing money in a card game, marks the beginning of what will become a life-long friendship although, on the face of it, they have absolutely nothing in common, either in terms of background or personality. Drum is a rather shy, self-effacing young man from a Labour-voting, working-class family who, prior conscription in 1957, had spent two years at the Ford factory in Dagenham. Carter is from a wealthy, well-connected background but, having just been sent down from Oxford, his father has insisted he should now do his National Service. However, keen not to be sent to the various areas of conflict his fellow conscripts are being posted to, he gets his father to pull strings and arrange for him to serve his time in the Catering Corps and, as a way of repaying Drum, ensures that he is included in this safe billet. They spend the final three months of their service at ‘Doom Town’, a mock-up of a town devastated by a nuclear bomb and used to train troops on how to support the Civil Defence Corps following such a catastrophic strike. It’s an experience which not only haunts both men but will influence their behaviour, and relationships, for the rest of their lives.
Following de-mob Drum marries Gwen, a barmaid he met in Cumbria and returns Dagenham to work at the strike-ridden Ford factory, whilst Carter returns to his life of economic security and privilege, marries Daphne and lives in the family home in the north. Each of the couples goes on to have two children. Although contact is maintained, their lives follow these very different paths for the next twelve years until, in 1971, Carter encourages Drum to move his family north, buy the farm next door to him (to prevent the land being sold to a developer) and become a farmer. From that point on the lives of the two families become more complexly entwined.
By the end of the short first chapter, set in 2019 and introducing the reader to Nate and Anneka (Drum and Gwen’s adult children), it’s clear that not only have the siblings been estranged for forty years, but that something
life-changing has now happened to reunite them. The timeline then switches to 1959, when Drum and Carter are completing their National Service at ‘Doom Town’, with the ensuing almost five hundred pages being devoted to a decade-by-decade exploration of their friendship, their relationships with their wives and their children, gradually building a multi-layered account of the events, both major and minor, which have influenced their decision-making and shaped their lives over a sixty-year period.
Told mainly from the perspectives of Drum, Gwen, and later Anneka and Nate, this hugely ambitious and engaging story managed to combine the intensity of the intimate, complex relationships between the various characters with evocative portrayals of the external events which were influencing their lives. I was impressed by the convincing way in which the author captured how the co-dependency of the unlikely, unbalanced and frequently toxic nature of the relationship between Drum and Carter was forged during their shared experiences of National Service and ‘Doom City’. How the promises made then, and honed over the years as each of them held the other to account, could never quite be broken, even when reneging on them was a clear temptation. Their relationship was central not only to how the story developed, but to the shifting dynamics between the two families over the decades, especially the relationship between the two wives. I found all the characters totally convincing, with each providing an essential ‘key’ to the veracity of the unfolding story – although it’s hard to give examples of this without revealing information which needs to be discovered incrementally!
The impact on both men of the time spent at ‘Doom City’, and the military exercises dealing with the mocked-up aftermath of a post-nuclear attack, has a lasting effect. However, Drum’s obsessive fear about the possibility of a nuclear war and whether he’d be able to protect his family, not only seriously affects his own mental health but inflicts a different sort of damage on his relationships with his wife and his children. In the following six decades there are numerous examples of threats to national and global security (eg, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War, IRA bombing campaigns, 9/11, terrorist attacks, suicide bombers etc) which provide fuel to feed his fears and, even when he’s able to intellectually recognise that his behaviour is dysfunctional, damaging to himself and to the people he loves, he’s unable to prevent himself from catastrophizing. I found the psychological integrity of the author’s depiction of how this crippling anxiety affected Drum, and those around him, very impressive.
Having lived through each of the decades this story covered, one of the reasons this was such an engrossing and thought-provoking story to read was because the author made such effective use of his research to distil an authentic ‘essence’ of each one. References to books, music, television programmes etc were interwoven with the major political and social changes which took place during this period of recent history, meaning that throughout my reading I felt thrust back into each era, able to recognise, and identify with, many of the issues the characters were struggling with … as a child growing up in the 50s, I had nightmares following training exercises at school about ‘what to do in the event of a nuclear war …’!
I think one of the reasons I could hardly bear to put this 533-page novel down was because of the author’s wonderful use of language to evoke not only a convincing sense of time and place, but to enable me to understand his characters in what felt like a very intimate way. One of the ways in which he did this was by allowing me to become privy to their inner reflections through their streams of consciousness as they explored different ideas, scenarios, consequences etc. Ignoring conventional rules of syntax, these disjointed ‘meanderings’ were often quite short, but I found they added layers of depth to each of the main characters, enabling me to ‘hear’ their distinctive voices. However, much as I enjoyed them, I suspect that some readers would be irritated by these sections!
In many ways this is a dark and disturbing story but it’s not one which is without moments of humour and glimmers of light, and I have no hesitation in recommending it to readers who appreciate complex, multi-layered, and thought-provoking novels.
With my thanks to the publisher and Readers First for my copy in exchange for an honest review. ( )