Rilla of Ingleside

Anne's youngest daughter is fifteen when the war begins, and keeps a diary through four years in which the brothers go one by one and she carries a motherless war-baby home in a soup tureen. Montgomery wrote it in 1920, immediately after the armistice, and it is the Canadian novel of the war written from inside a household waiting for news. The dog on the station platform is the detail nobody who reads the book forgets. Thirty-seven plates by painters including George Clausen and George Bellows follow the war years through harvests, summer fields and winter work, the home front rendered in the same quiet light the book keeps.