All Shall Be Well, by Richard Essberger

Author: Richard Essberger. Review by Fiona Grimshaw

When I was first introduced to All Shall Be Well, I had not yet met Richard Essberger, its author. We had, however, been in a correspondence about one of the characters in the book – Tessa Rowntree, who plays a small but pivotal role in the story. The Rowntree Society, where I work, was interested in finding out more about Tessa, as well as her cousin Jean, and other Quaker colleagues who worked with Czech refugees immediately prior to world war two.

The book is about so much more than just that, however. Having since met Richard, I now understand how much of a personal journey the writing of it must have been for him. The two main characters, Mary and Josef, are his parents, and their story is utterly compelling.

As readers, we are invited to decide for ourselves how much of this novel is fact, and how much fiction, but there is no doubt that it is the result of immaculate and detailed research. The book takes us from Vienna, through Czechoslovakia and Poland, to Britain and even across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada during the war years, returning to Austria later.

Without giving too much of the plot away, I was intrigued to find that the hero may have spent some weeks interned very near to the town where I was born and brought up.

The story covers key moments in history, and the impact of one chance meeting is placed in a wider context of intrigue and betrayal, which is pivotal to the whole sequence of events. But these affairs of global importance are also combined with a love story. I found myself hoping desperately for a happy ending, while suspecting that events would not turn out to be quite so straightforward.

Initially, I found the level of detail, and the writing approach taken by the author, a little challenging. But this feeling was soon replaced by an overwhelming desire to find out what happened next.

The theme of ‘All shall be well’ – famously uttered by Julian of Norwich – appears throughout the narrative, but readers will have to make their own judgement as to whether this is in fact the case. I like to think that the author’s journey in writing this book has achieved this from his personal point of view. I would like to thank him for giving us a deeper understanding of the significant role that Tessa Rowntree and her Quaker colleagues played in helping refugees escape. Their work turned out to be one of the precursors to the Kindertransport.

Fiona is the executive director of the Rowntree Society.

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