Skylark Farm

Antonia Arslan

The writing is beautiful. The descriptions of the people and the country are wonderful and there is an air of happiness about the whole land. Then everything changes when war is declared and an ethnic group is banished from their homeland.

Definitely worth the reading effort. The writing style is straightforward. The difficulty comes from the overwhelming impact on the reader's emotions of the plight of the characters.

Extract

For Henriette, who is three, the world stops at this moment. The smell of large oval loaves, ... the carafes of falls water and bubbly cider: all of this will coalesce in her memory into a single, enduring feeling of guilt, of offense, of inadequacy. On that distant sunny day in May, she and her family members, small and large, have all been judged - and found guilty of existing. And God has covered his face.

Parallels