This is a truly excellent novel. The prose is incredibly tight and the sense of place absolutely perfect. If you like Hilary Mantel or even Robert Graves, you'd enjoy this. The characters are really well delineated and the action comes thick and fast but never strays into boys own territory. Highly recommended. ( )

Wings of Contrition is a powerful and informative book that follows a young pilot through the early months of the first world war. The period detail is excellent and it is clear that the book has been meticulously researched. The author really conveys just how precarious those early planes actually were and you get a strong sense of the danger and excitement of taking them up for the first time. It is extremely well written, especially for a genre fiction novel. Think more Sebastian Faulkes or Pat Barker, rather than Bernard Cornwell or Ben Elton. It some ways it reminded me of Robert Graves’ “Goodbye to all that” or even Siegfriend Sassoon’s “Memoirs of a fox hunting man”. For an author that can’t have personal experience of the war, it is praise indeed to say that sometimes it reads like a contemporary account.

The book starts with some beautifully drawn scenes set at Rugby School in England, where the novel’s hero, James Caulfield is just finishing his education. You then get an insight into the pre-war world of privilege that reminded me a lot of the ITV series – Downton Abbey, as James starts to work out what to do with his life. Although not a lot happens for a good 40-50 pages, the language is beautiful – really very elegant and I found the world Hughes has created to be really immersive. Events soon take over though. The war breaks out and James heads off with his friend Elliot, to join the Army and learn to be a pilot. Everything starts to ratchet up then and the pace picks up accordingly. What starts as an elegant period study turns into a really strong thriller.

It is probably sufficient to say that things take a dark turn in France which leads inexorably to a really good plot twist at the end. The hero becomes consumed with the horror of the things happening around him and I found myself actually getting angry at the way the pilots were just left to fight the battle – with rubbish equipment, poor pilots and terrible weaponry. There is a scene where the hero meets Lord Kitchener where I was positively willing him to “tell it is like it is”, which of course he doesn’t.

Overall, I’d rate this very highly and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the period or just in historical fiction generally. The writing is excellent, the characters more than plausible and very much of their time and the plot pretty strong. I suppose the best word to describe it, is “immersive”. I read it over three evenings and I couldn’t put it down – especially so as I got near the end of the book. I came to care about these people and I sincerely hope that a sequel is in the offing. ( )