In the middle of the Blitz, with nothing in the shops and the bombs falling every night, the women of Sparrow Street decided to make Christmas anyway. It was the most defiant thing they ever did.

London, December 1940. Three months since the Blitz began. The East End is burning night after night, the men are gone, the children are evacuated, and Christmas — a real Christmas, a good Christmas, the kind that children deserve — seems like something from a different world. Grace Bellamy stands at Nell's counter and says what half the street is thinking: how can we even try?

Nell Cutler gives the only answer Nell ever gives. We try because we must. Now roll your sleeves up.

And so the women of Sparrow Street set to work — in the shelter, through the bombing nights, by the light of shielded lamps, Grace sewing rag dolls from scraps of old cloth while the bombs fall overhead, Rose unravelling jumpers to knit mittens, Vera carving wooden toys from offcuts, Nell raiding thirty years of the shop's back room. Present by present, made by hand in the shaking dark, a Christmas is built out of love and rubble and the fierce stubborn refusal of women who have already endured three months of the worst and know, now, what they are made of.

And then Christmas Eve arrives — and a bomb takes the church hall. And the Sparrow Street women, because they are the Sparrow Street women, move the whole Christmas into the shop, the back room, the yard, the street, and make it better than a church hall could ever have been.

A Wartime Christmas on Sparrow Street is the second book in The Sparrow Street Girls World War Two saga — a deeply felt wartime Christmas story about the women of the East End Blitz, the joy that love makes in the darkest places, and the Christmases that become the lights you carry through the whole long dark war.

A historical novel for fans of Ellie Dean, Dilly Court, and Maureen Lee — and for anyone who has ever made something good out of nothing, and known how much that is worth.

There is no dark so deep that love cannot make a light in it. The women of Sparrow Street proved it. In the rubble. Under the bombs. At Christmas.

A Wartime Christmas on Sparrow Street

Comentarios