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In the MoodLaura BloomYour Price: $29.49 Free shipping on orders over $45! 
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Annotation It's February 1946, and Robert Booker is just home from the war. He and his wife, Catherine, are separated by three years - but so much more. By 1944 Robert's letters had dwindled and one night Catherine found herself so desperate with loneliness and fear that she got drunk on bootleg gin and went out to Kings Cross. |
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Customer Reviews
Lisa Brockwell's Review of In the Mood
“In the Mood” is an extraordinary novel about the second world war and its aftermath, about Australia during a period of great upheaval, and, most importantly, about a woman (Catherine) and a man (Robert) struggling to reawaken their intimacy after being separated by the war and by all that has happened that they cannot share.
Like Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” “In the Mood” takes a well known historical period and, through the author’s great skill in bringing characters to life and disrupting clichés, offers a deeply original and intelligent account of life that is hauntingly universal. It is the first time I have ever read a book about the second world war where I felt like I could truly empathise with the female character, so often in any story about war women stoically stay behind, “keeping the home fires burning” and are portrayed either as victims or as jolly good time girls. Catherine is a remarkable character: she is sharp, vulnerable and clever and her journey and her choices stayed with me long after I finished reading.
But the novel isn’t just Catherine’s story, it also gives equal footing to Robert’s story of war in New Guinea and of trying to reintegrate into the world of work, marriage and domesticity. He dreamed of home and of Catherine the whole time he was away, but how can he be the same person after what he has done and seen? And Catherine has so clearly changed too, but how and why? Like a marriage, “In the Mood” weaves the stories of both characters together in a dynamic exploration of the different kinds of warfare engaged in by men and by women, ambition and its social constraints in Australia and the battles and compromises of survival and intimacy.
I can’t remember reading a novel that has moved me as deeply as “In the Mood” and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
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