The Soldier's Wife: A Novel

By Joanna Trollope

Dan Riley is a major in the British Army. After a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, he is coming home to the wife and young daughters he adores. The outside world sees these reunions as a taste of heaven after months of hell.

But are they? Can a man trained to fight adjust again to family and domestic life? And how will the family cope, if he can’t? How much, indeed, can Alexa, Dan’s wife, sacrifice her own needs to serve his commitment to a way of life that demands everything not just of him but of her and the children as well?

This novel takes a keen look at the lives of modern military families. With her trademark intelligence, empathy and clear-eyed insight, Joanna Trollope shows us a family striving to balance duty and ambition with intimacy and understanding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781443413046

Joanna Trollope

Joanna Trollope is the author of twenty highly acclaimed contemporary bestselling novels, including The Other Family, Daughters-in-Law and The Soldier’s Wife. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia’s Daughters, and ten historical novels published under the pseudonym, Caroline Harvey. Joanna was appointed OBE in the 1996 Queen's Birthday Honours List and was the Chair of Judges for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012

Reviews for The Soldier's Wife

[dianaleez · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Trollope writes interesting books that sometimes resonate with 'women's truths.' Because, like it or not, our lives do have unique demands soldier's wife or not.

[suztales · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In The Soldier's Wife, Joanna Trollope deals with a difficult subject--that of 21st century repeated tours of duty in a combat zone. These multiple deployments have various negative affects on not only the person sent to such dangerous duty in a foreign country but also on the loved ones left behind. Trollope apparently created her story based on scores of interviews and not on any military service of her own or that of anyone close to her. But this story needs to be told and I commend her for tackling it. I wish I could put a copy of The Soldier's Wife on the desk of every politician who thinks we should continue this insane series of Middle Eastern conflicts.In this book, we are introduced to British Major Dan Riley, who is returning from a grueling 6-month tour in Afghanistan, his third. At home, his wife Alexa waits with their three children, torn by apprehension and mixed emotions. She has been through this before. Alexa's major concerns are perhaps the weakest part of the novel. Her worry over her daughter's unhappiness at boarding school, and her own frustration at not being able to accept a teaching job "because we will soon have to move" seemed overblown to me. However, once I accepted these reasons as valid to this modern-day Army wife, the Riley's ensuing fractured family situation seemed legitimate. Dan's obsession with his men and his friend Gus, also a returning officer with the battalion, turn out to be sufficient reason for Alexa's anxiety. Each time Dan runs off to headquarters or comes in late because he has to check on Gus, she has plenty of cause to feel left out of his inner circle. Dan is so filled with what has happened to him, the injuries, deaths and mental breakdowns of his men, that he doesn't have enough emotion left over to deal with his family's problems; by comparison, perhaps whatever they are, these problems must seem very minor to him. I find that understandable. As the story progresses we meet several generations of family, all of whom get involved in this unhappy reunion that seems heading for a train wreck. The author uses a series of friends to depict events from the past which help to describe Dan and Alexa's background and personalities. Friends and relatives all struggle to understand what's happening between Dan and Alexa and want things to be right again. Through men in Dan's battalion we realize that subjection to repeated hazardous combat tours can result in serious bonding with their mates (as the Brits say) in a way that overshadows even the ties that bind a family into a unit. (These harrowing multiple separations from loved ones are relatively new to military life as we have known it, although there were some cases of it during the Vietnam conflict. Today it is routine.) Trollope gets this point across through the characters George and Eric Riley, Dan's father and grandfather, both retired military men whose marriages ended unhappily, yet they both realize the Army is asking far more of its soldiers today than in the past. Both urge Dan to give his wife the attention she deserves, to listen to her, to talk to her about his feelings. In the end, only Dan and Alexa can put their lives on track for a future together. I have to admit the attempt to portray life within a military community falls a bit short of the mark, but what these two people have suffered by repeated separations in their marriage comes through loud and clear.This is the first Trollope novel I've read, but I plan to read another. I picked it up because of the title and the subject matter. Perhaps some reviewers who are critical have no background in military life. I thought the subject well chosen and well presented. As I said at the beginning of this review, this is a story crying to be told. Thank you, Joanna Trollope.

[mcelhra · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I listened to this book on audio and three of the CDs in the middle of the book were misnumbered. I ended up listening to a good portion of the book out of order before I realized the error. I thought it was just really disjointed story! Anyway, I listened to a review copy so I’m assuming (hoping) that the CDs are labeled correctly on the final copy.Charlotte Anne Dore did a good job with the narration. I’m not familiar with the different regional accents in England but I did notice that some of the characters had different accents than others. Being an ignorant American, I will just assume that all the accents were appropriate.I felt ambivalent about this book. It was entertaining enough to keep listening until the end but I never felt connected to any of the characters, except Isabel, Alexa’s daughter. She’s a secondary character and only in a few scenes though. Her parents send her to boarding school to give her some stability. Apparently, it is common for children of British soldiers to go to boarding school to avoid having to move around and change schools. Isabel is miserable at boarding school and I felt really bad for her.So many characters were introduced so quickly that I had to listen to the first CD twice before moving on to the second CD to make sure I had everybody straight. I’m not sure if that’s the author’s fault or if I should blame it on mommy brain.I was really surprised with how invested Dan and Alexa’s parents and friends were in Dan and Alexa’s marriage. They were a bunch of busybodies but not in a humorous way. I was perplexed. Alexa’s supposed best friend Jack confused me too. I wasn’t sure what he added to the story other than being kind of mean to Alexa. I couldn’t figure out why she was friends with him.Honestly, I didn’t have much sympathy for Dan. I thought he was an ass most of the time and that Alexa was a doormat. Maybe it’s because I’m not a military wife or close friends with one. Perhaps if there would have been some background about his time in Afghanistan, I could have related to him better. Or maybe I’m a cold-hearted snake.The right person to read this book may be out there, but it was not me.

[kiwifortyniner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of Dan Riley a major in the army who is just coming home from a six month tour of Afgahanistan. He has a wife and three children he loves. You often see the pictures on TV news programmes of these reunions and think how pleased the family must feel to be reunited, but there is another side to the story which Joanna Trollope tries to show. Dan comes home and is finding it very hard to adjust to time as a civilian again. He is spending much time at the army base, and extra time helping out other soldiers with problems including his friend Gus, whose wife has just left him. He brings Gus home to stay at their house. Alexa his wife has been holding the fort and taking over respsonsibilites while he has been away and has things she would like to talk to him about but he is not there for her. Their oldest daughter is vey unhappy at boarding school and wants to be home with the rest of the family, and Alexa has a job she would dearly love to accept but feels so much tied down by the restrictions of army life. As for the rest of their families, they can see the problems between Alexa and Dan and how they seem unable to communicate, but feel shut out of their lives and unable to help. This was a good theme for a novel, and raised important issues, but i feel the characters need a little more depth to them, and a bit more detail was needed in the story.

[baystatera · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Joanna Trollope is a wonderful writer of women's fiction, but she doesn't seem to push the boundaries of the genre these days. Really good women's fiction touches your heart and makes you believe in the reality of the characters as you're reading, as Joanna Trollope does, but plain good fiction requires more complexity, more layers, more probing than we get in this story about a woman dissatisfied with her life as the wife of a soldier in the British Army. Joanna Trollope is still the Queen of the Aga Saga, and this is excellent women's fiction, but it seemed a little rushed and more focused on the marriage vs. career debate than on developing the characters.