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Not So Quiet . . .
  • Published: 19 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405997072
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

Not So Quiet . . .

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Discover your new favourite forgotten classics with the Mermaid collection – No 11: Helen Zenna Smith's Not So Quiet . . . with a foreword by Alice Winn

Nell Smith is one of England’s ‘Splendid Daughters’, women abroad doing their bit in WWI. At 21, she pays for the privilege of driving an ambulance to ferry the wounded between the front line and hospital.

Facing constant shellfire, half frozen, fed on slop, and enduring the lashing tongue of commandant ‘Mrs Bitch’, Nell and her sister drivers entertain no illusions about the war – unlike friends and family back home. Only their comradeship and letters from lovers sustains them.

As the war grinds on, the lottery of who lives creeps closer to Nell herself. A naïve girl volunteered for this. But who is this woman nightly driving blind through hell itself?
  • Published: 19 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405997072
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

About the author

Helen Zenna Smith

Helen Zenna Smith was the pseudonym of Evadne Price, born in Australia (at sea, according to Price) as Eva Grace Price in 1888. In her early twenties, she moved to London and New York, looking for work. Soon returning to England – without her husband – she embarked on a stage career, married again, and turned to journalism. She began writing short pieces of comic fiction, including the popular Jane Turpin (a female Just William) stories. Not So Quiet . . . was originally commissioned as a satire of All Quiet on the Western Front, but Price thought that distasteful and turned to the diaries of a friend for inspiration in her tale of a female ambulance driver. It was an immediate sensation. Price also wrote over a hundred thrillers and romances under her own name, and appeared as an astrologer on TV. She died in Sydney in 1985.
HZS

Praise for Not So Quiet . . .

A bittersweet feminist antiwar novel . . . Brilliantly written, and cleverly mixing humour with bitterness

Library Journal

'Intriguing . . . vividly and impressionistically tells of the author's tour of duty in France. One welcomes its return to print

William Boyd, New York Times

The reader is immediately gripped by its furious, indignant power

Chicago Sun-Time

A powerful condemnation of war and the societies that glamorise it

Kirkus Reviews