The Soldier’s Wife examines how three generations of a family struggle with the impact of war on their relationships, long after the tour of duty is over. Dan Riley is a major in the British Army. After a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, he is coming home to the wife and young daughters he adores. The outside world sees these reunions as a taste of heaven after months of hell. But are they? Can a man trained to fight adjust again to family and domestic life? And how will the family cope if he can’t? To what extent can Alexa, Dan’s wife, sacrifice her own needs and fulfillment to support his commitment to a way of life that demands everything, not just of him, but of her and the children as well? What happens when love and a vocation collide head-on? With her trademark intelligence and kind, clear-eyed insight, Joanna Trollope shows us a family striving to balance duty and ambition with intimacy and understanding.
Joanna Trollope (1943–2025) was the author of historical novels and a study of women in the British Empire. However, she became best known for her lively contemporary novels, often centered on the nuances and dilemmas of domestic life in England. Her novel Parson Harding’s Daughter won the 1980 Romantic Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists’ Association. She was awarded the OBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honors List for services to literature. She was a descendant of nineteenth-century English novelist Anthony Trollope.View all by Joanna Trollope