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It sounds dreadful- I said to him one day. But actually the war is the best thing that ever happened to me.Helenas mother always said she was a born poetess. It was not a compliment. Now an old woman- Helena looks back on her life and tries to capture the past- filling notebook after notebook with memories of her respectable- rigid upbringing- her unyielding mother- her loyal father- her golden-haired brother. She remembers how- at their uncles country house in the summer of 1914- their stately bourgeois life of good manners- white linen and afternoon tea collapsed into ruins. And how- with war- came a kind of liberation amidst the mud and rubble-and the appearance of a young English photographer who transformed her existence. Lyrical and tender- filled with images of blazing intensity- While the Gods Were Sleeping asks how it is possible to record the dislocation of war; to describe the indescribable. It is a breathtaking novel about the act of remembering- how the past seeps into our lives and how those we have lost leave their trace in the present....