WARTIME ROMANCES

Ten books to swell your heart.

The Dust That Falls From Dreams

Louis de Bernieres, Harvill Secker

THERE is no answer from the 18th century former rectory in Norfolk that is home to award-winning novelist Louis de Bernieres.

But if I’d expected him to be holed-up in his study, agonising over the sequel to last year’s epic The Dust That Falls From Dreams, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

“I was playing my guitar at the other end of the building. I can become lost in my music,” he apologises with disarming warmth.

Scheduled to hit his editor’s desk in the spring, the book is part of a trilogy inspired by his grandfather and the Great War.

Louis juggles his work with the needs of his children Robin, 11, and Sophie, eight, of whom he has joint custody with his former partner.

“They are amazing,” says the author who became a father at 50. “Sophie is a gymnast and I take her to training three times a week. While she is there Robin and I go fishing.”

Family is clearly important to the man who has Scots blood in his veins.

“My father’s mother lost her fiancé in 1915,” he reveals. “He was an American and did not have to fight but did. He was killed in France. She married my grandfather in 1918.”

But her heart remained with her fallen love and her husband eventually disappeared from the family. Louis, who searched for his grandfather, says: “He died in the Rocky Mountains at the age of 96. I found his grave and the hut he had lived in.”

Daniel Pitt, the protagonist in the latest saga, is a flying ace whose character is loosely based on the absent patriarch. The second book centres on Pitt who, having unexpectedly survived the war, is deciding what to do with ‘So Much Life Left Over’ – its favoured title.

Louis, whose first love is poetry, took to novel writing on the advice of an agent. He wrote his first book The War Of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts while laid up with a broken leg after a motorbike accident. It earned him the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book.

Yet he considers Birds Without Wings to be his finest. He was working on it when he declined an offer to write the film script for his novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

Today Louis’s career appears to have come full circle, this month marking the first anniversary of the publication of his poetry collection Of Love And Desire and he has reignited his passion for singing and songwriting.

So will he now count these as his most notable achievements? Not by a long shot. He says: “My kids are the best thing I have ever done.”