Time of the Singing of Birds

The plot is a homecoming. A soldier comes back from the war with a serious injury and meets again someone he knew as a child, and the relationship develops out of a shared background and a shared faith rather than out of a courtship in the ordinary sense. The book treats convalescence as the setting in which both the friendship and the faith can be re-established. It was published in 1944, and the injury that brings the soldier home is serious enough to make the convalescence the whole of the setting.

The second movement turns on obligation. The soldier intends to return to the fighting, and his reason is that he wants to help rescue the man who encouraged his beliefs and saved his life, which makes the romance and the war service two claims on the same person. Tyndale House reissued Hill's novels decades after their original publication, which is why this title exists in a late twentieth-century edition. The man he wants to go back for is the one who encouraged his faith and saved his life, so the obligation is personal rather than patriotic.