Set in November 1920, Wake takes place over the five days between the exhumation and burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day. The account of the body’s journey from an unknown grave in France to London is interwoven with the emotional journey of three bereaved women each struggling to deal with her loss – Ada is a housewife who is haunted by the memory of her son’s death; Evelyn, grieving for her lover, works as a clerk, almost to spite her upper class family; and Hettie is a dancing partner whose father is dead of the Spanish flu and her brother is shell-shocked and catatonic. The narratives of these three women, told in intimate present tense, focus on their ordinary lives and gives a very real sense of the great burden of grief carried by the generation that survived the War.

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