This is a beautiful anthology. It's heartfelt and poignant and grim and hopeful and moving. All the stories are well written. It's not always easy reading, but it's worthwhile reading. This is a quality collection that's full of heart.

This anthology of stories from the era of the Great War has a range of protagonists and themes. Some stories do focus on a romance, others are more a slice of life. There are characters from across the LGBTQ spectrum, and only once or twice did a story feel like it was included for inclusiveness, so to speak. Almost all of these are very well written, and several are excellent. With 13 stories, I won't rate them separately, but I was moved, fascinated, and sometimes amused. This is a fine reminder of both the human spirit and the way war destroys lives. Not light reading, but a journey worth taking.

This anthology contributes a portion of the royalties to a charity for British Armed Services veterans, but it is worthwhile even without that added bonus.

Well researched, but it suffered from the tendency to cover the same kind of relationship. I appreciated the inclusion of lesbian and intersex narratives, but the vast majority of the plots were incredibly similar, which did decrease the dramatic tension in each story somewhat; they seemed to fit into the same template. A few stories could also have benefited from further editing and proofreading. Overall, it's a good collection and it's for a great cause - I just wish they'd been a little less focused on the typical soldier + soldier = forbidden affair in the midst of battle narrative.

Quite often the blurb for a book exaggerates, or offers a promise that the words inside simply do not deliver. I am pleased to say that, in the case of A Pride of Poppies, the stories within do much, much more. Each story has clearly been written from the heart and with the heart of the characters in mind. We do not just see the lives of lesbians and gays either, one of my favourites stories of the anthology being that of an intersex character.


What really struck me, as I read each for the first time, was that so much seems to have changed for the LGBTQIA community in the last hundred years in terms of recognition and decriminalisation of their lifestyles and yet the core of each of the stories still holds true today – that being free to be yourself and love who and how you want can still be one of the hardest tasks in the world.


I cannot, hand on heart, say that each story accurately represents every aspect of the war that it includes, but I wouldn’t expect to be able to. In fiction the story is always the most important part and anyone who picks up a work of fiction expecting cold hard fact is always set for disappointment. What I can say is that I was swept up by the emotions of each story, concerned more for the characters than anything else, and I certainly didn’t find myself jolted out of any story thanks to any jarring incorrect portrays of life (whether in the trenches or on the home front) in WWI. Which is as it should be.


Of course, as is the case with any anthology containing stories from a myriad of authors, there are some that I prefer more than others, but I can, hand on heart, say that I didn’t find one that didn’t move me or make me think about some aspect of living at a LGBTQIA person during the war that I hadn’t considered before. This is something that, given my deep and abiding interest in WWI, you should know is no idle praise and I feel quite honoured to have been asked to review the book before its general release.

It’s hard to rate anthologies: you’d never give five stars if it has to be for every story, and that isn’t fair on anthologies; I think my five means, this is an outstandingly strong collection.

My sister edited, but I bought my copy post-publication, without any spoilers beforehand except to hear about how her recruitment of stories was going.

First let me say what a wide range there is of settings and situations.

Two, ‘No Man’s Land’ and ‘The Man Left Behind’, are about people who want or feel an obligation to enlist; but one is intersex, presented as a man, who can enlist but with plenty to face if he does; and the other is only a man on the inside, in a woman’s body. This latter is simply told, as Henry(etta) joins the women farm labourers and meets a woman who fancies her as she is; both of these are 4.5 from me for the human situations portrayed. ‘The Man Left Behind’ was one of the stories that left me with a happy smile, too, along with a lesbian story, ‘Lena and the Swan’, wherein Lena exploits the absence of husbands at the front – again, a situation where women are doing jobs that had been for men before the war. Glad to see a commitment-avoidance freewheeler get a run, even if she (very reasonably) falls for an awkward ugly duckling with a swan neck. Another story, ‘War Life’, was more like social history; a woman in factory work; her sacrifice for the war has nothing to do with sexual love or sexuality – these don’t figure in her life – but she has had to put the Suffragette movement, to which she is committed, on hold, for the war.

So that’s an interesting bunch of stories. Others: ‘Inside’ is Germans in an English interment camp – effects of the war on them, as they manage a love story; ‘Per Ardua Ad Astra’ is for flying nuts (did you like Biggles?), and the guys’ situation as gay men is on the backseat, but with interesting details slipped in of how they live.

The more eviscerating stories tend to be about men, young or older men, who are dealing with either grief for a killed partner, while still in service themselves, or with injuries, themselves or their partners, and if or how they are to manage a love that has to be secret, in these circumstances. But I thank the editor for leaving us with the story set in French Indochina; although Minh and Thao have a rough growing-up, and are caught up in a revolt against the French while the French are meant to be distracted in Europe – Minh was called up to serve at the Front in Europe, with which he has very little connection – in spite of what they go through, this story is a note of hope to end on. I hope that’s not a spoiler (is it?) I knew my sister the editor wouldn’t plunge me into gloom at the end.

I still want to say a few words about my two five-star stories. ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ by Jay Lewis Taylor, quite a short story of an accidental encounter in the trenches, a hyphenated officer and a non-hyphenated guy; they just talk and dodge bombs and stuff, in a short time-frame, but this was so nicely written, so alive. I like short time-frame stories, close-up, the story of a night. My other, on the contrary, felt like a novella, even though I see it isn’t the longest in the book; I was so absorbed in this involved story of lives that – and I mean this in a good way – it seemed longer than it is. ‘A Rooted Sorrow’ by Adam Fitzroy was every bit like an E.M. Forster story to me. Even its beginning, with a Mrs and an old-maid Miss in conversation in an English village: it didn’t look too riveting at first glance, but it was riveting, and the deflected perspectives – I don’t know how to put this – how those conversations work in the story; how it’s a mother in discovery of her son and in… probably not discovery, but revelation to us, perhaps to her, of her deep humanity, in spite of social pressures. This story ranges across the village, before the war and after, its social life, its conservative values and injustices of the past – not just the four gay lives in the village, whose stories are very real and effectively told, by being embedded in this village and seen through others’ eyes. That was poorly described, but trust me, the narrative and the spirit of the story said to me more and more strongly as it went along, E.M. Forster. It was seriously good.