Cold Snap

For innumerable people in Great Britain, the second half of the forties was a period of return to homes and former occupations after the volcanic dislocations of the war. Michael, having repeatedly risked his life as an Air Force pilot, is now back in his comfortable and privileged existence as a fellow of a major Oxford college. After the excitements of her years in SOE, the Special Operations Executive, his cousin Christine is attempting to fulfill her tutor's high expectations of her as a classical scholar of note.
For the German prisoners crowded together in a camp on the outskirts of the town there have been no such returns. But at least the previously severe edict against any sort of fraternization has been in some measure relaxed, So it is that a chance conversation that Michael initiates with a solitary prisoner, Thomas, precipitates a friendship between the fastidious don and a little group of prisoners, whom he eventually introduces to Christine.
Soon Michael has become profoundly attached to Klaus, a previously robust East Prussian hideously wounded before his capture, who remains totally unaware of the dormant passion that he has aroused. Christine starts a tumultuous affair with Thomas, a would-be composer. Inevitably the relationship is a difficult one in a world in which many of the victors oppose relationships of any kind with representatives of the hated enemy.

Francis King is a former International President of PEN and drama critic of the Sunday Telegraph. His fiction includes Act of Darkness, Dead Letters, and The Custom House. Arcadia published Prodigies to great acclaim in 2001, while his 28th novel The Nick of Time was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2003, attracting critical praise from Harold Pinter, Antonia Fraser, Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Lively, and Margaret Drabble.