Adam Raine is born into the lowest social strata of a British Empire on the verge of irrevocable change. His impoverished childhood in early 20th-century London is marked by one misfortune after another: first the death of his mother, then his father's inability to find work. Adam's father gets a second chance when a relative offers him a job in coal-mining country, in the town of Scarsdale, helping the miners negotiate with the mine's owner, Sir John Scarsdale.
Adam comes of age in this new countryside home amid miners and their sons toiling in horrifying conditions deep beneath the earth. He is sent to a nearby school, in hopes that his intellect will earn him a scholarship to Cambridge or Oxford. He makes a few friends and enemies, develops a romantic interest in the local parson's daughter, and seems to be on a path that will send him above his father's social station. But then, like the rest of his generation, Adam's life is utterly upended by World War I.
Simon Tolkien (The Inheritance; Orders from Berlin), grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien, crafts an epic coming-of-age story in No Man's Land. He draws on some of his grandfather's experiences fighting in the Battle of the Somme to depict Adam's tribulations in the trenches. Tolkien hits all the resonant notes--class conflict, romance, family drama, war--that turn No Man's Land into a thoroughly enjoyable, if sometimes a little melodramatic, piece of historical fiction. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer