I loved In The Mood. It drew me into an intense world of a husband and wife in a relationship under stress. That fact that it was set just after WWII, with a strong sense of that period, highlights the differences between then and now.

A young married couple, Robert and Catherine, have been separated for the duration of the war. Before the war, both were were qualified architects working in the same firm - he as an architect and she as a "draftsman". Robert has been fighting in New Guinea, enduring the trauma of battle in a tropical nightmare of rain, heat and mud, learning to be ready to die at any moment. Catherine stayed at home, promoted now to be an architect, stoically bearing the deprivations, loneliness and the daily fear of losing her husband. In a fit of fear and despair near the end of the War, Catherine has a fling with a US Marine. The book starts just after the end of WWII, as Robert comes home to Catherine. Can they find their previous intimacy, suffering as they are from their different traumas?

In setting the book just after WWII, In The Mood asks what are the consequences of war, even for the winners. Those soldiers that do return come back damaged, and in the intimate space between Robert and Catherine, the emotional damage is described with more feeling and insight than I have ever encountered. The injunction at the time for wives to act as though nothing is the matter and that nothing has changed sounds like a scary case of denial, and Robert and Catherine are left to battle it out between themselves to try find some kind of peace in this new reality.

This war damage hurts the soldiers but it also hurts those who love them and live with them. I kept thinking of the line in the Milton poem, "They also serve who only stand and wait." The women back home carried a huge burden, to keep society going and to keep the dream alive of a world to return to that was worth fighting for. I'd never thought about just how much of a service it was, this standing and waiting, until I read In The Mood. Laura Bloom gives expression to what must have been demanded of the women at home, both during and after the war, and the toll that it must have taken. Catherine wears these demands heavily, often heroically, sometimes buckling under them.

I like the respect this book accords to its historical characters. It is not that they are less enlightened or more stupid than we are now but they are the inheritors of the values of their times and they do their best within those values.

In The Mood is about so much: the relationship between husbands and wives and what they owe one another; war and the peace that is built on top of it; the more gendered differences in the roles and opportunities for men and women of a couple of generations ago; trauma and whether it is possible to get over it; the struggle of individuals to rise above their lot in life in search of their calling; the alienation caused by shame and secrets; and sex as a driving force between people that won't be denied.

Laura Bloom accesses a level of depth and honesty that I found compelling. For all of this heavy emotional traffic, In The Mood is also a page turner. Intense, dramatic, and filled with incident. It is beautifully written, with verve and style. The characters, the time and place are vivid and ring true. I highly recommend it.

John Stevens

Laura Bloom’s new book: “In the Mood” is about war. The war that soldiers brought home together with their guilt for what they did and for their own survival. It is a war shattered in a million pieces that fill the air like a swarm of locusts getting into people’s nostrils and lungs and each and every one of their thoughts. It is a powerful spell that breaks only when the protagonists state what they want and go for it.

In the Mood is a great novel; beautifully written and expertly situated at an historic point of flux: when the war is finally over, when life can continue and everything is possible. It is about a society ridden with guilt for what it has asked its men to endure and so demands that its women forget their competence and step back into their kitchens to free space for the returning soldiers.

Social control is dissected and exposed for what it is: a web of obligations and constraints that cover every aspect of communal human life: work, neighbourhood, family. A brutal dance of demands and obligations that commands actions and shapes lives.

And love of course, this book is about love: the intimacy that feeds it and the secrets that kill it but in Laura Bloom’s unsentimental pecking order, survival comes before love.

Laura Bloom’s new book is a terrific read. Its characters feel real; their choices and mistakes twisting the story in unexpected, though believable ways. In the Mood will enrapture and engross you in a way that only a great book can. Its destiny is to become a modern classic.

Maurizio Viani

Will be ordering this book today. Great story with something Thanks for chance to read a chapter and really sample what a gripping story this is. Can't wait to get my hands on the rest of it! Congratulations.

I am very excited about the launch of In the Mood - everything I have read about it on your wonderful new website has really whet my appetite. I am particularly looking forward to reading a novel about the second world war from an Australian point of view, and where a woman's experience is so central to the narrative. Congratulations and I can't wait to get my hands on it!