CORNISH HARVEST

'Lizzie looked around her: at the sunshine, the corn, the sea and the cliffs. Of course her father was right. These things were eternal.' But are they? It is 1914, the lights are about to go out allover Europe and Lizzie Treloweth's stable and happy Cornish life is plunged into confusion. One of ten children, she and her family struggle to run her father's butcher's shop and, when he enlists, she misses him and the Jago brothers from the neighbouring farm more than she believed possible. Lizzie volunteers to nurse the wounded at Little Manor, as does the spoilt and wayward Tamsin Beswetherick. But Tamsin's actions threaten to disgrace them both, and a despairing Lizzie is forced to leave Penzance and seek a new life in the Land Army after she loses the man she loves. As the war to end all wars takes its grim toll in France, on the bleak Home Front Lizzie learns to live again, and finds that love may be found in unexpected places. A tender and perceptive story of hope and the possibility of happy endings, Rosemary Aitken transports the reader back to a time of passion and pathos, of heartbreak and hard work in a novel which captures the essence of wartime Cornwall and its inhabitants.

(This book is also available as an audio cassette)