Another Kind of Loving and Beyond the Broken Gate are the first two parts of a trilogy, called Distant Voices, conceived by the author Sylvie Nickels after moving back from travel journalism to her first love: fiction. What makes them shine amid all the crowd of books published every day is the vividness of the descriptions, the humanity of the characters and of course the stories themselves. Her love for the Balkan countries, her work as a journalist and her passion for people’s stories come beautifully to life in these touching and enjoyable novels.

The first book, Another Kind of Loving, tells the story of a man and a woman who decide to foster a child from Bosnia. The coming of the little girl in their lives means many different things for each one of them and they subsequently react differently to her existence, letting at times their weakest points come out. Minkie, the young Bosnian girl, serves as a lens, through which the author depicts a view of Middle England from a different perspective. She also serves as a trait d’union with the second book, Beyond the Broken Gate. Together with the continuation of Minkie’s story, when she gets back from Bosnia to the UK, two more lives cross hers: Rowena’s, whose grandfather died in WWII - she goes back to the UK from Australia to find her family’s origins - and Luke’s, whose grandfather fought in the First World War after which he was suspected of child abuse. Luke looks through his memoirs and tries to rebuild his granddad’s experiences to redeem his reputation and his memory. These three existences, all with an indirect wartime experience, run parallel and cross at times in the small English village of Daerley Green, Oxfordshire, from which the personae of the books will move in search of their roots.

Once again, within Beyond the Broken Gate the war is not only an echo. In the aftermath of September 2001, whose destructive meaning is where the title comes from, all the characters are affected by their own war and feel its consequence in their personal ways. The wars and the characters’ reaction to them represent a perfect portrait of the cause/effect cycle, where each single event has its consequences. In Sylvie Nickels’ works, these consequences gently intermingle and naturally turn out to be the stories of her characters. Sylvie’s experience and talent as a travel writer are visible; but she also shows great narrative skills and the ability of putting together a highly involving and compelling story.

The third book, Long Shadows, is available from March 2010.