Last year I was both charmed and moved by Elizabeth Speller’s first novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett.

I hadn’t expected to the man who had led me through that story again, but when I picked up The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton I found that I would.

Six years after the end of the Great War Lawrence Bartram was travelling to the Wiltshire village of Easton Deadall, to help and support an old friend who had been commissioned to create a war memorial.

Because nearly all of the men of the village had joined up together, and they had died together too.

But a shadow had hung over the village, and the Easton family who lived in the manor house, long before the war. Because five year-old Kitty Easton had disappeared from her home years before, leaving no trace.

And then Kitty’s father died in the war, leaving his widow holding the family estate in trust, for the missing daughter she could not believe to be dead.

She was supported by her sister, by the family’s loyal staff, and maybe by her husband’s two younger brothers.

For a while the story moves slowly as Elizabeth Speller paints this picture, of places, of lives, of relationships. She writes beautifully, and every detail, every nuance is right.

And, in time, a plot begins to build. A village child slips away from a group on an outing, and the search for year uncovers a woman’s body on the estate. And maybe that disappearance, that death, are related to the earlier disappearance of Kitty Easton.

Lawrence, as the outsider, the neutral party, becomes the confidante of many, and he begins to investigate.

Eventually all questions would be answered, and answered well.

Those questions, and the facts that emerged, were intriguing, but this book held much more than mysteries. It was a human story, with characters and relationships quite beautifully drawn.

And, though the story was set in England after the Great War, its themes were timeless.

You see, it was a story that said a great deal. About how we deal with grief, and how it changes our futures. About the secrets we keep behind the faces we present to the world. And about how much we will do to protect the people and things we love.

The ending left a lump in my throat.

Because  the answer to the question of Kitty’s disappearance was so unexpected, and yet so right.

And because I had seen Lawrence, the man who had been paralysed by the loss of his wife and child when we first met, coming out of himself just a little more, accepting that he had to go on living.

And the hints about what his future might hold were very interesting.

I suspect that we will meet again. I do hope so.

“In years to come, Laurence Bartram would look back and think that the event that really changed his life was not the war or the attack at Rosières, nor even the loss of his wife, but the return of Captain John Emmett …”

Laurence Bartram is one of many whose lives were changed forever by the Great War. He endured the horrors of the Western Front, but he lost his wife in childbirth.

After the war he had no need to work and no purpose. He became reclusive, staying at home, writing a book that he knew he would never finish.

But then he received a letter from somebody that he remembered well, even though he hadn’t seen her for years: Mary, the sister of his school-friend, John Emmett.

Why, she wonders, did her brother survive the war only to kill himself?

Can Lawrence, the only friend her brother ever brought home from school, help her to understand?

Laurence is drawn to Mary and he accepts her commission. It leads him into a complex mystery, and involving – without giving too much away – the nursing home where Emmett was a patient, a group of war poets, and a horrific wartime incident.

The mystery is clever and well structured, but it is rather too reliant on coincidences. And one or two things felt rather contrived. But I could forgive this book those failings. The important things are in it favour.

The story revealed was so powerful, and had so much to say about the strengths and weaknesses of humanity, the burden of knowledge, the horrors of war, and the iniquities of the class system.

Elizabeth Speller’s write beautifully and is a fine storyteller. She has clearly done her research and, through the testimony of her characters, time, place and emotions come to life so vividly.

Those characters, lightly sketched, have faded from my mind, but their stories and their emotions have stayed with me.

And those stories and emotions speak not just for those characters but for a generation.

This is a wonderful debut novel, and Elizabeth Speller is definitely an author to watch.