Fields of Wanting

By: Thomas, Mark

Suffolk, 1942. Eleanor Hartley steps off the train at Ipswich with a cardboard suitcase, a returned engagement ring, and no very clear idea of what comes next.

What comes next is the Women's Land Army: five-fifteen starts, leek fields in March frost, cows with opinions, and a battered 1937 Fordson tractor that needs to be asked politely before it will cooperate. What comes next is a Victorian rectory turned hostel, shared with five women she has never met - Dorothy from Birmingham who names all the animals, Josephine who reads Tolstoy on agricultural equipment, Frances from Edinburgh who can identify aircraft by engine note and keeps herself very carefully managed around most people.

Around Frances, Nell notices, she is managing nothing at all.

Set against the noise of American bombers crossing the Suffolk sky each morning and the nine o'clock news each evening, Fields of Wanting is a novel about a woman learning what she is made of - through physical work, through unexpected friendship, through desire that does not conform to what she had been told desire looked like. It is about the particular freedom that wartime created for women whose ordinary lives had been suspended: the chance, rare in any era, to discover yourself on your own terms.

This is also a novel about mud. And the specific hell of six women sharing one mirror.

Rich in period detail - the rationing, the dances, the Italian POWs working alongside the land girls, the aircraft that filled the Suffolk sky - Fields of Wanting brings to vivid life a world that deserves to be remembered: the women who fed Britain while the men were away, and who learned, in the process, what they were actually worth.

Emotionally honest, frequently funny, and deeply felt, Fields of Wanting is for readers who love Sarah Waters, Kate Atkinson, or anyone who has ever stood in a muddy field and found themselves unexpectedly alive.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H5WFYQC1
• ISBN13: 9798181996793
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"