Sonia

Writing for his infant godson, the narrator looks back on an English social circle whose confidence has been shaken by war. He sets the span of his recollections between the late summer of 1898 and August 1915, beginning with school friends gathered at the Daintons' Hampshire home. Their country house routines, family ambitions and easy familiarity establish the world through which Stephen McKenna develops this novel.

Sonia Dainton belongs to that family, while Jim Loring, David O'Rane and Bertrand Oakleigh are among the people named in the narrator's account. Personal recollections sit beside arguments about public affairs. In the middle excerpt, diplomatic secrecy, international alliances and growing armaments occupy the narrator as he recalls Bertrand's campaign against the Foreign Office. Sonia offers readers a portrait of social privilege and political uncertainty, seen through someone trying to explain the changes overtaking his own acquaintances.