Postcards From No Man’s Land

Aidan Chambers’ 1999 novel Postcards From No Man’s Land is comprised of two interwoven stories separated by fifty years and two generations. The first tells of Jacob Todd, a seventeen-year-old English (“not Welsh or Irish or Scottish”) boy who travels to Amsterdam to pay tribute to his grandfather (also named Jacob; to omit confusion, I will refer to the teenager as “contemporary Jacob” and his grandfather as “Grandfather Jacob” when they are discussed in close proximity), who was wounded at the Battle of Arnhem fifty years prior.