War's Wake

About the Book

A Love Story from the Aftermath of World War II

THEY SEEMED MADE FOR EACH OTHER: young and in love, and filled with dreams. But something went terribly wrong. Was it the awful aftermath of the war? Or something more? Something incomprehensible. Something never anticipated or perceived.

On a university campus bulging with ex-GIs, a traumatized combat veteran and an idealistic sophomore fell madly in love. Years later, the long-dead sophomore, invading his computer as he tries to make a novel of his life, lures him back to reprise what went wrong. Their bittersweet reassessments and besotted indulgences provide a wacky tour of Truman-era morality, a sobering look at postwar USA, and an ardent time-travel love story about memory, commitment, and the decisive decisions that frame our lives. Along the way readers may:

Join the American Veterans Committee (AVC), a new WW II veterans organization with the idealistic slogan "Citizens First, Veterans Second";

Cheer Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., Charles Bolte, Cord Meyer, and others as they battle the American Communist Party for control of AVC;

Integrate a bar near the campus that refused to serve Blacks;

Attend a seminar led by Alger Hiss, later accused as a Soviet spy;

Go to a riotous Communist Party rally and emerge intact and wiser;

Vote for Thomas Dewey, Strom Thurmond, Harry Truman, or Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential election;

Get married as a dazzled Episcopal priest mingles the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy with Saint Paul as the lights go low in the funky little Episcopal Church near the campus; and

Relive that crazy and wonderful year, 1948, when in the glow of youth, the end of World War II, and the establishment of the United Nations, all the world seemed filled with promise even as the beginning of the Cold War cast ever-darkening shadows.

Within this beautifully written, brainy, and often witty love story, are a plethora of observations about war and its repercussions, love and its consequences, memory and its caprices, writing and its perils, and death and its regenerations. "War´s Wake" is a fun-to-read fantasy even within the poignant, nostalgic sadness of its main story line.

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"War´s Wake," the novel, is a sequel to the memoir
"Dear Captain, et al.: the Agonies and the Ecstasies of War and Memory"

World War II love stories Message board

About the Author

Allan Wilford Howerton, a Western Kentucky native, is a World War II infantry veteran and a retired federal civil servant. He is a graduate of the University of Denver (B.A. in international relations,1948; M.A.,1951) He also studied at Drexel University and Shrivenham American University, England. Following retirement, he worked in local politics and was a founder and general manager of a local cable television channel. He writes, Allan says, for the joy of remembering and to put off, as long as possible, the perils of forgetting. He and his wife, Joan, a registered nurse, live in Alexandria, Virginia.