博客來In September 1916, Ada Lennox refuses to say ＂amen＂ to a prayer for victory. This small act of conscience connects her to a network of women across Europe who are preserving evidence of what the Great War actually looks like-evidence that governments want destroyed, truths that no one is supposed to speak.
From London drawing rooms to French casualty clearing stations, from Manchester Quaker meetings to Berlin apartments under surveillance, four women bear witness to the corollary of every prayer for victory: the bodies, the gas casualties, the young men reduced to statistics in reports that no one will read.
Ada Lennox, a sixty-eight-year-old widow who lost her son in the Boer War. Iris Lennox, her granddaughter, a nurse collecting forbidden photographs at the front. Catherine Bryce, a minister’s wife who can no longer stay silent. Margit Erdmann, married to a German chemist who helped create the chlorine weapons.
Connected by an Irish nun who has been gathering testimony for forty years, these women build a network that crosses enemy lines, defies censorship laws, and speaks the truth that power does not want spoken.
Drawing on Mark Twain’s ＂The War Prayer,＂ Aristophanes’ ＂Lysistrata,＂ and Hesiod’s myth of Pandora, ＂The Corollary＂ is a Fractional Fiction novel about the women who refused complicity in the lies that made war bearable-and the price they paid for bearing witness.
