Random Harvest

Random Harvest, published in 1941, is James Hilton's most ambitious novel. Charles Dorvington, a distinguished businessman and MP, has lost all memory of several years following his injury in the First World War. As fragments of that lost time begin to surface, the reader discovers alongside him a secret life of extraordinary tenderness. Hilton constructs an intricate puzzle of identity and memory, exploring how war and class can erase not just the past but the self. The novel was a massive bestseller and remains a quietly devastating study of what it costs to become respectable.