Amazon.co.uk Review
In 1914 Vera Brittain was 21 years old, and an undergraduate student at Somerville College, Oxford. When war broke out in August of that year, Brittain "temporarily" disrupted her studies to enrol as a volunteer nurse, nursing casualties both in England and on the Western Front. The next four years were to cause a deep rupture in Brittain's life, as she witnessed not only the horrors of war first hand, but also experienced the quadruple loss of her fiancé, her brother, and two close friends. Testament of Youth is a powerfully written, unsentimental memoir which has continued to move and enthral readers since its first publication in 1933.

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The blurb reads:

"In 1914 Vera Brittain was eighteen, and as war was declared she was about to go up to Oxford. Four years later her life - and the life of her whole generation - had changed in a way that was unimaginable in the tranquil pre-war years. This is her account of how she survived the war; how she lost the man she loved; how she nursed the wounded; and how she emerged into an altered world".

A big thank you to Katisha50 for bringing this book from my wish list to the annual meetup of the UK BookCrossing Group, The UnConvention.

It’s one of my all time favourite books and it’s going in my permanent collection. I read it some time ago but I was absolutely bowled over by its power. I’m not usually a fan of biography but I found this totally absorbing, desperately tragic and deeply moving. During the first world war, Vera Brittain lost almost every man that meant anything to her and she describes the deep effect it had on her.

On the piano, on the concourse.