The Kingdom Round the Corner

On a blustering March morning in 1919, Lord Taborley walks back into London life after five years of war, a man his friends still call Tabs and barely recognise otherwise. Coningsby Dawson follows him as he goes looking for the private happiness soldiers promised themselves in the trenches, the kingdom round the corner that always seems one street away. What Tabs finds is Terry Beddow, the young woman he came home hoping to marry, drawn instead to General Braithwaite, a decorated officer who was once his own valet and body servant. Published in 1921, the novel works the war’s social aftershocks through a single household: class lines coming loose, ranks thinned, and the awkward business of loving people the fighting has altered. Dawson, who served with the Canadian artillery, writes the homecoming without sentimentality.