The Great War The People's Story

Accompanying an all-star ITV series by the same name, this book gives an incredibly personal perspective on World War I, both at home and at the front, by vividly reconstructing the experiences of individuals through their diaries and letters During World War I just under a million British people died--a figure so huge that it becomes almost meaningless. It feels impossible to give it a human context. Consequently we struggle to truly grasp the impact this devastating conflict must have had on people's day-to-day lives.

We resort to looking the war in general terms, treating the events as distant, viewing them in terms of their political or military significance. This book is entirely different. Like the all-star ITV series it accompanies, it completely immerses the reader in the everyday experiences of real people who lived through the war.

Using letters, diaries, newspapers, and parish records--many of which have never been published--Isobel Charman has painstakingly reconstructed the lives of people such as separated newlyweds Alan and Dorothy Lloyd, plucky enlisted factory-worker Reg Evans, and proudly independent suffragette-sympathizer Kate Parry Frye. Their stories are retold in intimate detail, offering a uniquely personal and powerfully moving account of the conflict. This book is both a meticulously researched piece of narrative history, and an incredibly moving remembrance of the extraordinary acts of extremely ordinary people.