This story--part memoir, part historical fiction--spans a period of one hundred years, from 1914 to 2014, with the main emphasis being on the years of the two World Wars. It concentrates on the lives of real people--the author's parents, the author, a young pilot from New Jersey in WW1, and others--as well as some fictional characters, who all lived through one or both of the wars and were profoundly affected personally by them. Arise the Dead I focuses on World War I where the author's dad took part in the Battle of Loos (September 1915) and where he was wounded.

Elizabeth Langridge was born in 1938 in the south of England. Her earliest memories are of the Second World War. In 1966 she married a Canadian who was in London working for two years. That year they came to Toronto to live. They have three children.