The New York Times bestselling author of the Maisie Dobbs series offers a deeply personal memoir of her Kentish childhood and her familyâs resilience in the face of war and privation.
After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfatherâs shellshock, her motherâs evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving fatherâs torturous assignment to an explosives team during WWII; her parentsâ years living with Romani Gypsies; and Jacquelineâs own childhood working on farms in rural Kent, capturing her ties to the land and her dream of being a writer at its very inception.
An eye-opening and heartfelt portrayal of a post-War England we rarely see, This Time Next Year Weâll Be Laughing is the story of a childhood in the English countryside, of working-class indomitability and family secrets, of artistic inspiration and the price of memory.