Soon to be a Major Motion Picture 
 "Soon to be a major motion picture" proudly proclaims the book jacket. And I am not surprised. Rhidian Brook's novel has well-developed characters, ample romance and danger, an important historical context, and significant moral issues. The only major movie challenge would be to capture the devastation of Hamburg in 1946, the city still shattered by the 1943 fire bombings. Brook writes well, easily shifting between different settings and points of view. A bit too easily, perhaps. There is a particularly British style of storytelling that I have noted before, especially in war stories (Kate Atkinson's 
 Life After Life 
 is a recent example), rooted almost in domestic social comedy, that makes for highly enjoyable reading and would translate easily to film. But although this does not have the artificial sheen of a Hollywood screenplay, it just misses the jagged edge that the subject ideally demands, that would have distinguished the true novelist from the able screenwriter. 
 Colonel Lewis Morgan arrives in Hamburg in 1946 to take up the post of Regional Governor under the British occupation. An exquisite house is requisitioned for him on the banks of the Elbe, but rather that sending the former owners to a billet elsewhere, he asks the family to stay on, using the upper floor as their apartment. This unique offer is only one of many ways that show him to be an altogether more humane administrator than his doctrinaire colleagues, for whom fraternization is a deadly sin. So the Morgans move in with the Luberts: Lewis with his wife Rachel and 11-year-old son Edmund, Stefan with his slightly older daughter Freda, a former Hitlermadel who refuses to accept defeat. Both families have suffered losses: Stefan Lubert's wife was killed in the firestorm; Rachel Morgan lost her eldest son to a stray bomb dropped in an apparently safe area. She has become bitter and withdrawn, unreasonably casting blame on her husband, and resenting the living arrangements that have been forced upon her. 
 Brook says that his inspiration was the unusual decision of his grandfather to share his requisitioned house in a similar situation to Colonel Morgan's. One assumes that most of this is imagination, because I don't think I would want my grandchildren to know the sordid details of that fraught year of cohabitation. But it is all believable, and all the major characters ultimately show a strong moral sense, no matter what missteps they may have made in getting there. Lewis is perhaps a little too good to be true, but his humane bonhomie also has its limitations; there are still very real dangers out there. Rhidian Brook is best in his domestic scenes, but almost as good in the office, presenting Lewis' successes and occasional failures with colleagues, visiting politicians, and his superior general. The author is also to be commended for including a subplot focusing on a group of feral children, the so-called Trummerkinder, made homeless by the war. This is not as successful as the elements he can imagine at first hand, though he is certainly trying to get beyond the domestic, to reach the degradation and horror. I especially commend him for not sugar-coating the civilian slaughter caused by the Allied devastation, and some of the British attitudes early in the book made me cringe. This is not a perfect novel; I was at 3.5 stars most of the time I was reading. But its moral center is in the right place, and that encourages me to round up.