I just finished a re-read (for the third—or fourth?—go-round) of Rosamund Pilcher’s book, Coming Home, which has to be one of my favorite books, as much as I try not to name favorites (because it always provokes a way-too-long list in my head and ends up getting re-ordered during hours of insomnia). Pilcher is sometimes under-rated because of a handful of (short) books she wrote that are obviously formula-driven romance novels, and people expect all her writing to be the same, when, in fact, it’s almost as if (except for the Cornwall setting, which remains pretty constant) there are two writers, with the second waiting to emerge when all the formula stuff was out of her system.

Her most famous books are The Shell Seekers and Winter Solstice, and I love (and re-read) those as well, but for me, Coming Home is the definitive book of her career. It’s a coming-of-age story set within the framework of World War II, beginning in the pre-war years and ending after the war is over. It follows the life of Judith Dunbar, whose father works for a company in Ceylon; Judith spent her first 10 years there, but when her younger sister, Jess, came along, her mother brought the two girls back to England, to Cornwall, leaving her father to a bachelor existence. (This was a common living situation in a time when it was considered dangerous to try to raise Caucasian children in that hot climate.) Now Jess is four years old and Judith is 14; in 1935, their father receives a promotion to a position at the company’s offices in Singapore and wants his wife with him, so Mrs. Dunbar and Jess are traveling back out to the East, while Judith will stay in Cornwall, attending a boarding school in Penzance and holidaying with either her father’s or her mother’s sister, both of whom live fairly close by.

Judith’s existence is transformed by her friendship with a week-to-week boarder at the school, Loveday Carey-Lewis, who returns home each weekend and invites Judith to accompany her. These British aristocrats have an extensive estate called Nancherrow, out at Land’s End, with luxuries about which Judith has never dreamed—a butler, a cook, a nanny, stables, their own cove and beach—and soon Judith is welcomed as one of the extended family by Loveday’s glamorous mother, Diana. But the war imposes hardships on everyone, lower class to royalty, and Judith has her share of life changes that determine her responses to both love and tragedy as the years pass.

It doesn’t sound like such an exciting story, detailed here, but there is something so poignant and so immersive about the stages of Judith’s somewhat lonely teenage and young adult years, especially set against the magical backdrop of Cornwall (and her adoptive family) and dealing with the sobering consequences of living in a country at war. The joys, the sorrows, the suspense about which way the story will go next always hold me enthralled from beginning to end.

I also confess that the artistic aspect Cornwall represents, with its Newlyn School of painters (that are also detailed in Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers), is an additional draw for me. Pilcher’s books, along with Daphne du Maurier’s, are the reason I spent 10 days in Cornwall in April of 2002; my cousin Kirsten and I rented Whitstone Cottage from the National Trust, formerly inhabited by the blacksmith for the Penrose estate between Helston and Porthleven. After reading about it for all those years, it was like coming home for me!

If you’re in the mood for an intimately personal tale with an historical backdrop and multiple settings that portray various ways of life during that time, be sure to check out this book. If you’d like to read an amusing anecdote about our stay in Cornwall, go here.