After having such a lovely time reading Mrs Porter Calling last week, this week’s Recommendsday features some more World War Two-set books that will give you a similar feel. And I had to think long and hard about it – because so many books that sprang to mind at first were Great War books – and that’s a whole other post!
I’m going to start with Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet series, even though I’ve already written a Series I Love post about them. They start in the 1930s, so if you just want the war period you could just start at book two – The Light Years. I mean I don’t recommend it because you won’t get the full impact of it all but you could if you want to. The Emmy Lake books are first person and just follow Emmy and these have a much wider group they follow, but in terms of the mixture of warmth and tears, they are right up there.
Next up: Mary Wesley’s The Camomile Lawn. It has more sex than Emmy Lake, but if you want the Home Front, it has that – people trying to carry on in the most dangerous and uncertain times. It has that sense of normal rules being suspended because the world might be about to end and people doing things that they wouldn’t normally have done.
It’s set in 1946, but Jojo Moyes Ship of Brides is all about the wartime brides heading over to their unknown futures with the soldiers they have married. There are no massive surprises (or at least I don’t remember any big twists, but it’s been a decade!) but you really get to know the women on the boat and care about what happens to them.
If you want mysteries set in this period, may I please nudge you again at Maisie Dobbs. There are lots of bad series set inWW2 (no I won’t name them here) but once this series actually gets to the Second World War (at Book 13 – In This Grave Hour) it is one of the best.
It’s much older and the first section is much grimmer, but I want to give an extra mention to Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice. I’ve mentioned it before but you follow Jean from her life as an English woman living in Malaysia, through her capture by the Japanese and the death march she was put on to her post war new beginning thanks to an inheritance. I like the Alice section best because it is a strong woman paying something forward, but I know that that may be unusual. It is a little of its time, but I’ve loved it for so long I find it hard to be rational about it.
Happy Wednesday!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 
Another fine post, Verity. Well done! I am especially interested to see you remembering and celebrating Nevil Shute’s “A Town Like Alice”. As you know, the story is based on real experiences of men and women in Japanese POW and internment camps during World War II, and, very interestingly, how they rebuilt their post-war lives after appalling suffering. The book has been filmed (Peter Finch as the hero) and made into a TV mini-series (Bryan Brown as the Aussie survivor of a brutal bayonet war crime).
Nevil Shute wrote several other books about World War II, and, sometime, the aftermath. He was an aeronautical engineer, and during WW II worked as a backroom scientist helping develop special weapons.
I’ve never met a Shute novel that wasn’t gripping, and memorable.
His insight into many aspects of wartime experience is remarkable.
His small novel “Landfall”, also nicely filmed, is a neat story of aircraft hunting for U-boats, with a nice wartime romance along the way.
His “Pied Piper”, also based in a true story, I believe, and also memorably filmed (twice, first with Monty Woolly, and much later with Peter O’Toole), is a delightful adventure about an old man helping an increasingly large group of children escape the Germans during the Fall of France in 1940.
I wonder if you know Nevil Shute’s immensely sad novel “Requiem for a Wren”, about a woman who served in the Women’s Navy (known as “Wrens”), and — as we would now understand — suffered almost crippling PTSD?
Like “A Town Like Alice” (and “In the Wet”, and “On the Beach”, and others) “Requiem for a Wren” ends in Australia. Shute migrated after WW II, and drew on his familiarity with Australia for several novels.
Nevil Shute created many interesting and appealing women characters, such as the film star and the air hostess in “No Highway” (memorably filmed as “No Highway in the Sky”, with James Stewart and Glynis Johns and Marlene Dietrich — the quality of actresses indicates the quality of written character in the novel).