The New Mrs Clifton

Name: The New Mrs Clifton
Rating: 4.2 (3963 reviews)

by Elizabeth Buchan

First published 2016

Amazon

4.2(3,963)

As the Second World War ends, Gus Clifton returns to his family in England after working with interrogation teams in Germany. He brings an unexpected wife: Krista, a German woman he has secretly married in Berlin. His sisters see the former enemy under their roof, while Nella—the English woman who expected to marry Gus—struggles to understand what happened to the future they had assumed was settled.

Buchan builds the novel around the emotional wreckage of war rather than the battlefield itself. Bomb-damaged London and devastated Berlin shape the characters’ suspicion, grief and moral uncertainty, while the household becomes a pressure chamber for questions of guilt, loyalty and survival. The mystery surrounding Gus and Krista’s marriage gradually exposes what ordinary people were forced to do in the final months of the conflict.