Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

Aug 10, 2025 5:30 AM

Author:Virginia Woolf

'The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound - far more than prayers and anthems - that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we - not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born - will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead.'

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Reviews

The beauty of Hrabal's book is how he is able to make this tightly-wound object move...what Hrabal has created is an informal history of the indomitable Czech spirit. And perhaps...the human spirit

—— The Times

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—— Los Angeles Times

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Readers won't be able to pull themselves away...

—— Publishers Weekly

Fonseca's prose is fluent, confident and often funny ... she has a gift for satire that glimmers through this novel. And a near-perfect ear for nuances of speech. Attachment is ferociously well observed. Both physiologically and socially ... as a first novel, the signs of greater things are clearly there

—— Guardian

Fonseca's voice - poised, particular, exotic - rises above her plot

—— Observer

Her prose is elegant and wry

—— Daily Telegraph

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—— New Statesman

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this smart, clammy drama, manages to be both unsettling and touching

—— Guardian

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Fonesca's debut novel is a funny, heart rendering account of the virtues of love and desire, confounded against the everyday.

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—— Good Book Guide

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This impassioned tale is a gripping read

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Jones is fabulous...offering titbits of danger and discord, yet keeping a cool matter-of-fact tone for the big horrors

—— Sunday Times

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Full of danger and discord

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