Old Tropes Mostly Well Handled 
 This was my first Cleave novel, and I didn't know what to expect. The first section, PRESERVATION, begins in 1939 with the declaration of war. Mary North, 18, English upper class, at once leaves her Swiss finishing school and comes back to report to the War Office. All right, then: we have been here before, many times--of course she is going to be trained as a spy. But no, first surprise, she is assigned to teach in a school, to free up people who are really needed. Actually, she turns out to have a gift for it, although it is not a gift that endears her to the headmistress, who does not take her with them when the children are evacuated to the countryside. At more or less the same time, we meet 23-year-old administrator Tom Shaw, who clearly falls for Mary and finds her another class to teach. When Tom's roommate Andrew signs up, and we see him in basic training, all the familiar tropes of a British WW2 novel fall into place: attractive young woman, infatuated young man, normal rules set aside, sense of adventure, touch of romance, and that defiant humor that is virtually a British speciality. I must have read at least six other novels that do much the same thing. 
 Only Cleave has some distinctive features of his own. There is a growing attachment between Mary and a dyslexic pupil Zachary, the son of a black entertainer. I gather that there is something similar in Cleave's Little Bee, but unable to make comparisons, I certainly found it interesting here. And Cleave has a way of punctuating his largely lighthearted tale with sudden death that comes out of nowhere. In the second and longest section, ATTRITION, the shocks come more frequently, and any comedy gets a desperate edge. Successive chapters alternate between the London Blitz and the island of Malta, which suffered two years of constant Axis bombardment--two communities under siege, as Cleave writes in an afterword. In both settings, the situation goes from bad to worse to excruciating. 
 So excruciating, in fact, that I wanted to put the book down, but breathed a sigh of relief on seeing the title of the final part, RESTORATION. But even this begins with further horrors. The WW2 romance genre, of course, requires that it all come out right in the end--but by now I could no longer trust the author to deliver on it. And all strength to him. I picked this up to a certain extent as comfort food; this was the Britain of my infancy, and I welcomed the familiarity of those well used tropes. They got me started. But Cleave nudged me more than once out of my comfort zone, and that was what kept me reading. 
 All the same, it is not a five star novel. Cleave makes more of the social conflicts than the military ones, yet his upper-class characters are caricatures; only Mary was really seen from the inside out. And while I could believe the pervasive racial prejudice, I could not quite buy the flavor of it; the frequent uses of the n-word seemed to have more modern overtones than those I recall as a child. And Cleave's determination not to tread the usual happy ending route led him to take a number of twists in his last few dozen pages that weakened rather than enhanced the whole. Three and a half stars for me. But still, this is an obvious bestseller, and will attract readers not burdened by my critical perspective.