DAY – a novel

Publication date 5th April, 2007

Alfred Day's life began and ended with the war. In that overwhelming, chaotic, furious parenthesis he had finally found a proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber, built a true kinship with his air-crew and – most extraordinary of all – fallen in love. When he met Joyce in an air-raid shelter during a period of leave, she had given him the one thing he needed: a reason to carry on.

Before the war, a lifetime ago, it seemed he was a boy, or less than a boy: an inadequate, inexperienced child, trapped in Staffordshire with his doting, suffocating mother and abusive father. And now, after those four years of terrible, terrifying violence, he is prematurely old; his RAF friends are dead or vanished, Joyce has married, his life has lost what brief point it had. While everyone around him tries to forget the war, Alfred holds on to it as his one reality, accepting the role of an extra in a 1949 POW film in an attempt to reclaim his life. In the ersatz camp, surrounded by actors, fake ordnance, chipboard huts, cameras and stage machinery, he begins the search for that brief reality, his buried self; looking for some semblance of hope: trying to move forward by going back.

A superbly realised novel about the brutal simplicities of war - of horror, and the camaraderie found in the closeness to death - and a moving exploration of the complexities of human emotion, Day is a wonderful piece of storytelling: the freight of history and humanity carried effortlessly by the beauty of the writing. For previous readers of A.L. Kennedy's books the dark humour, close observation and thrillingly original language will come as no surprise; for new readers, this novel will be a revelation.