My Dear I Wanted to Tell You
My Dear I Wanted to Tell You • Book 1
by Louisa Young
Why You'll Love This
A love letter written in a trench that may never arrive captures everything this book is about — connection severed, and still desperately reaching.
- Great if you want: class-crossed romance set against the brutal reality of WWI trenches
- The experience: quietly devastating — it builds slowly, then breaks you open
- The writing: Young alternates front-line grit with domestic longing, keeping both brutally honest
- Skip if: you want war fiction driven by action rather than emotional interiority
About This Book
Set against the bloodied fields of World War I, this novel follows two couples whose lives are torn apart and reshaped by a conflict that spares nothing — not youth, not class distinction, not love. Riley Purefoy, a working-class boy in love with a conductor's daughter, enlists in a moment of wounded pride and finds himself swallowed by the trenches of Flanders. Back in England, the women he and his officer Peter Locke have left behind must navigate their own particular kind of waiting. The emotional stakes are enormous — not the grand sweep of history, but the intimate, aching question of whether the people who go to war can ever fully return to the people who loved them.
What distinguishes Louisa Young's writing is its refusal to sentimentalize. The prose is precise and unsentimental even when the subject matter demands every tear it could wring. She moves between front lines and home front with structural confidence, letting silences and unfinished letters carry as much weight as action. This is a novel that trusts readers to feel the gaps between what characters say and what they cannot bring themselves to.
