The Great War: A Nation’s Story

Accompanying an all-star ITV series, The Great War- The People’s Story gives an incredibly personal perspective on the First World War, both at home and at the front, by vividly reconstructing the experiences of individuals through their diaries and letters.

During the First World War three quarters of a million British people died - a figure so huge that it feels impossible to give it a human context. Consequently we struggle to truly grasp the impact this devastating conflict must have had on people’s day-to-day lives. We resort to looking at the war from a distance, viewing its events in terms of their political or military significance.

The Great War- The People’s Story is different. Like the all-star ITV series it accompanies, it immerses the reader in the everyday experiences of real people who lived through the war. Using letters, diaries, and memoirs - many of which have never previously been published - Isobel Charman has painstakingly reconstructed the lives of people such as separated newly-weds Alan and Dorothy Lloyd, plucky enlisted factory-worker Reg Evans and proudly independent suffragist Kate Parry Frye. A century on, they here tell their stories in their own words, offering a uniquely personal account of the conflict.

The Great War- The People’s Story is both a meticulously researched piece of narrative history and a deeply moving remembrance of the extraordinary acts of extremely ordinary people.