Preparing for Takeoff

Published in 2018, Pamela Mulloy’s first novel, The Deserters, is the tragic love story of a lonely wife on a farm in New Brunswick and an American soldier who goes AWOL while on leave from Iraq. Whereas that slim book examines an aftermath of war, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder, Mulloy’s latest work explores how the prelude to war can dramatically transform the lives of everyone involved.

As Little as Nothing is set in the English countryside on the eve of the Second World War. The inciting incident occurs when Miriam Thomas, the artistically talented but frustrated wife of a village shopkeeper, is lying despondent in bed in her bucolically named Hawthorn Cottage. Recovering from a fifth miscarriage, she hears an airplane overhead. It is in trouble, the engine sputtering and coughing. The day is Thursday, September 1, 1938, precisely one year...