The past is another subplot, by Ali Bacon
For November my book group chose the theme of war, and for this post I intended to do a kind of war book round-up. But along the way, I realised two of the novels I'd read made me think of the same writing problem - how and when to include back-story, i.e. stuff that has 'already' happened when the story begins. Book A in this regard is a prize-winning literary novel of WW2 which opens with vignettes of two characters - a blind French girl and a young German soldier – each living in deadly peril a short distant apart in the town of St Malo just before if falls to the invading Allied forces. The solider is all but buried in a cellar and the girl is alone at the top of a neighbouring house. The bulk of the novel follows the individual journeys that brought them here and for me, despite the beautiful writing and fascinating history – particularly of the German, an orphan whose technical wizardry gets him noticed and promoted by the Nazis - the tension was confined to th...