The personal life of Lewis Eliot, the central figure and narrator of C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers, takes centre stage in this moving account of his wartime years.The suicide of Lewis’s desperately vulnerable wife, Sheila, ends a marriage fraught with difficulty and pain and shakes his world to the foundations. As Britain enters the Second World War he is swept up into the civil service, and meets Margaret Davidson, a woman who may offer him emotional redemption – but who is already married. With its exceptionally sensitive and insightful exploration of the human condition, Homecomings demonstrates C. P. Snow’s masterly insight into character, whether in the home or along the corridors of power. A meticulous study of the public issues and private problems of post-war Britain, C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers sequence is a towering achievement that stands alongside Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time as one of the great romans-fleuves of the twentieth century.