Excerpt from Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The tin whistle, sounding again. Above the enclosures, seagulls wheeled in hope. The memory of feeding time persisted. Mary felt an ache. All the world's timetables fluttered through blue sky now, vagrant on the winds.

"Thirteen?"

Mary smiled. "Would you like me to show you? You're a bright boy but you're ten years old and you are miles behind with your numbers. I don't believe anyone can have taken the trouble to teach you."

She knelt in the straw, took his hands—it still amazed her that they were no hotter than white hands—and showed him how to count forward seven more, starting from seven. "Do you see now? Seven, plus seven more, is fourteen. It is simply about not stopping."

"Oh."

The surprised and disappointed air boys had when magic yielded so bloodlessly to reason.

"So what would be three sevens, Zachary, now you have two of them already?"

He examined his outstretched fingers, then looked up at her.

"How long?" he said.

"How long what?"

"How long are they sending us away for?"

"Until London is safe again. It shouldn't be too long."

"I'm scared to go to the country. I wish my father could come."

"None of the parents can come with us. Their work is vital for the war."

"Do you believe that?"

Mary shook her head briskly. "Of course not. Most people's work is nonsense at the best of times, don't you think? Actuaries and loss adjusters and professors of Eggy-peggy. Most of them would be more useful reciting limericks and stuffing their socks with glitter."

"My father plays in the minstrel show at the Lyceum. Is that useful?"

"For morale, certainly. If minstrels weren't needed I daresay they'd have been evacuated days ago. On a gospel train, don't you think?"

The boy refused to smile. "They won't want me in the countryside."

"Why on earth wouldn't they?"

The pained expression children had, when one was irredeemably obtuse.

"Oh, I see. Well, I daresay they will just be awfully curious. I suppose you can expect to be poked and prodded at first, but once they understand that it won't wash off I'm sure they won't hold it against you. People are jolly fair, you know."

The boy seemed lost in thought.

"Anyway," said Mary, "I'm coming to wherever-it-is we're going. I promise I shan't leave you."

"They'll hate me."

"Nonsense. Was it minstrels who invaded Poland? Was it a troupe of theater Negroes who occupied the Sudetenland?"

He gave her a patient look.

"See?" said Mary. "The countryside will prefer you to the Germans."

"I still don't want to go."

"Oh, but that's the fun of it, don't you see? It's a simply enormous game of go-where-you're-jolly-well-told. Everyone who's anyone is playing."

She was surprised to realize that she didn't mind it at all, being sent away. It really was a giant roulette—this was how one ought to see it. The children would get a taste of country air, and she . . . well, what was the countryside if not numberless Heathcliffs, loosely tethered?

Let us imagine, she thought, that this war will surprise us all. Let us suppose that the evacuation train will take us somewhere wild, far from these decorous streets where every third person has an anecdote about my mother, or votes in my father's constituency.

She imagined herself in the country, in a pretty village of vivid young people thrown into a new pattern by the war. It would be like the turning of a kaleidoscope, only with gramophones and dancing. Just to show her friend Hilda, she would fall in love with the first man who was even slightly interesting.

She squeezed the colored boy's hand, delighted by his smile as her bright mood made the junction. "Come on," she said, "shall we get back to the others before they have all the fun?"

Excerpted from Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave. Copyright © 2016 by Chris Cleave. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.