The Soldier's Home

I felt at a disadvantage not having read 'The Single Soldier' which introduces us to the main characters of Simone and Jacques when I started reading this book.
However, I was soon absorbed into the long distance love affair between Simone (now in New York) who had left France at the end of WWII via the refugee escape route over the Pyrenees. She had left behind her lover Jacques who is also father to her young son and begins a series of letters back to him even though Jacques is "the worst letter writer in the world."
As Simone starts out on a life in America, working, living, sometimes loving she retains a passionate link to Jacques who remains in an isolated village rebuilding the house/home which he moved 6kms down the road to rebuild also his life after the death and destruction of the Nazi invasion.
Then we meet middle aged teacher Enid Makin, who has spent a lonely loveless life teaching English in Manchester and being a carer to both her parents and yet harbours a need for change and passion.
In an extraordinary build up within the merging plots the author often has the ability to evoke the deepest of desires in men and women, brought together often after much trauma and across cultural differences in France and America through decades of political upheaval and change.
There was a slow start but it is so worthwhile growing with the characters and with Simone and Jacques particularly.
The world of rural France was magically described and in contrast America's harsh prejudices alongside freedom to be someone else evoked a wonderful life for a stranger in that land.
Intrigued to go back and Costigan's first novel so I can absorb the beginnings of a story that will stick with a reader for some time.