Everyone Brave is Forgiven / Chris Cleave

Mary is a very upper-crusty native of London. When Britain and France declare war against Germany in 1939, she immediately shushes off the ski slopes of her posh finishing school in Switzerland, gets on a train back to England, and signs up for volunteer war service. She fancies herself in the role of a wartime spy, but instead is put in charge of a class of school children to fill in for male teachers called to active duty. This lasts for only a few days at which point the children are evacuated to the countryside and she is let go because she identifies a little too closely with her young pupils. In particular, she bonds with an American boy whose father is employed by a minstrel show at the London Lyceum, and this bond lasts throughout the novel.

Mary first views the war as an adventure, but is nearly done in by it. Her large family home in Pimlico survives seemingly untouched with its servants and staid butler, almost preserved like a relic from a vanished world. At the same time bombs almost continuously rain down on working class East London in what seems like a classist plot by the German bombers. There is a wonderful and unlikely long-distance romance that develops and survives the cruel twists that the war presents, joining two strands of the narrative.

UK cover

This novel is full of great prose, wonderful dialogue, exquisite historical detail, and particularly great insight into the London blitz and the siege of Malta, the latter about which I knew very little. There are just so many wonderful “bits” that will stay with you long after you put the book down.

Readalikes: A God in Ruins, All the Light We Cannot See

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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