The Foreshadowing

The Foreshadowing is a 2005 young adult novel by the British writer Marcus Sedgwick, set in England during the First World War. Sedgwick was one of the most ambitious YA writers of his generation, and his books regularly took on dark, demanding subject matter that other writers in the genre would not touch. The Foreshadowing fits squarely into that pattern. The narrator, Sasha Fox, is a teenage girl in 1915 who has begun to have premonitions of death. She knows when people around her are about to die, and she cannot do anything about it.

As the war drags on, Sasha sees soldiers in her visions, men she does not know but who keep appearing to her in their last moments. When her older brother Tom enlists and ships out to France, the visions become harder to bear. Sasha, who has been trying to use her gift to help where she can, eventually decides to go to France herself, working as a nurse, in the desperate hope that being closer to him will let her change what she has already foreseen.

Sedgwick writes about the First World War with the same restraint that British war poetry of the era brought to it. There is no melodrama in his battlefield scenes, just the grinding awfulness of what the war was actually like. The premonition element gives the book a quietly mythic quality, with echoes of the Cassandra story from Greek myth, and Sedgwick handles the supernatural element so carefully that it never tips the book out of historical fiction.

For older teen readers and adult readers who like literary YA, The Foreshadowing is a powerful, melancholy book. Readers who have liked Sedgwick’s other novels like Midwinterblood or She Is Not Invisible will recognize the voice. New readers will find a good entry point into the work of one of the genre’s most distinctive writers.