If you are looking for a book to take to the beach this summer, Ladysmith, by Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize winner Giles Foden, is not that novel. Because it is so compelling and evocative, it deserves to be read without distractions. Take it up to your air-conditioned bedroom.

Based on the author’s ancestors’ letters, transcribed by an anonymous hand and discovered among fishing tackle, this novel maintains a fine sense of mystery and suspense. Intricately interwoven, the story takes place in the town of Ladysmith during the Boer War in the decisive year of 1899. The inter-chapters detailing the romantic interest of Bella Kiernan, daughter of the Irish patriot who opens the first chapter by recounting the story of his flight from Ireland, provide an intriguing subplot. While the story of the war — its correspondents and soldiers — largely dominates the plot, Bella’s attractions to the Spaniard barber Torres and the British soldier Tom Barnes captivate the reader.

Foden’s style is deft, subtle, and convincing. His descriptions, while spare, capture the essence of his subject . "If you drew a line crossways, from Bella to the starlit mountains of the Berg, it would pass through Torres’s shop on the Keate Road. There, sat in his leather chair, his feet upon the counter, the barber was drinking a glass of sherry. Its golden liquid was illuminated by the glow of the candle which, burning with absolute steadiness, also shined up still further his well-polished boots. His thoughts turned on manes extravagant: in particular the triple coil of his lost love, dark-haired Isabella Teixeira de Mattos. Where was she now he wondered, that other Bella? Caressing her husband? Undressing herself before going through to him? His spirit soured at the thought … .He must, he recalled, have sat there for hours, staring at the white pebbles, for by the time he went home it was evening and the moon above the city was a hard pebble itself and the streets had become unlovely."

Suggestion rather than statement animates this writing: "He looked out over the sun-scorched, stone-freckled plain again. It wasn’t vast enough to be a desert, but the bare expanse he could see created that impression: freedom, space, a kind of totality that was also crushing. It absorbed one ineluctably, drawing the eye towards the infinite" [35]. One is left pondering — and rejoicing — in the power of this exterior as well as interior description.

When Foden approaches the topic of sex, he does so with such gentleness that the reader feels drawn into the scene rather than repulsed by it. Foden’s achingly beautiful details reverberate, yet they still leave a sufficient amount to the imagination. Bella’s innocence seems intact even after her unexpected marriage.

Chapters blend into each other; even through different narrative voices are employed, the transition is seamless. Appearances by Gandhi and Winston Churchill are not merely gratuitous, their personalities rounded out by the observations and reflections of other characters. Churchill especially is captured down to his slight hesitancy in speech, bombast, and lisp.

The use of native Zulus, Muhle Maseku and his family, wife Nandi and son Wellington, contributes verisimilitude and human sympathy in a sometime-bleak narrative. The loyalty of Wellington to his injured father, and the warmth engendered by Bella’s caring for her servants, even after she has been removed from her home, contribute an unforgettably poignant human landscape.

The immediacy of the war is ever-present, but the caring of characters for one another does much to eclipse its gloom. Particularly tender are the accounts of the soldiers fumbling attempts to nurse each other back to precarious health. Juxtaposed with gripping details of the battles are philosophical observations such as "Each eye had its own vision … but some eyes saw nothing at all." These provocative gems are interspersed through the novel, stated without emphasis, yet causing the reader to reflect well beyond the pages on which they appear. Even the besieged town of Ladysmith seems to take on its own character.

Letters written home during the war, detailing some of the atrocities, along with the fast-paced final chapters, add variety to the narrative. Although a few sections of the book seem drawn-out and a bit tedious, the characters — even the minor ones — are memorably and vividly-depicted, and the reader finds her or him self surprised by their all-too-human actions and concerned about the destinies they forge for themselves. Ladysmith burrows into the reader’s soul.