We Are At War
Simon Garfield
  • Published: 15 September 2006
  • ISBN: 9780091903879
  • Imprint: Ebury Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $37.99
Categories:

We Are At War

The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times

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The highly-acclaimed diaries of ordinary people's lives in WWII, packaged as a massmarket woman's read for the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of war

Of all the accounts written about the Second World War, none are more compelling than the personal diaries of those who lived through it. We Are At War is the story of five everyday folk, who, living on the brink of chaos, recorded privately on paper their most intimate hopes and fears.

Pam Ashford, a woman who keeps her head when all around are losing theirs, writes with comic genius about life in her Glasgow shipping office. Christopher Tomlin, a writing-paper salesman for whom business is booming, longs to be called up like his brother. Eileen Potter organises evacuations for flea-ridden children, while mother-of-three Tilly Rice is frustrated to be sent to Cornwall. And Maggie Joy Blunt tries day-by-day to keep a semblance of her ordinary life.

Entering their world as they lived it, each diary entry is poignantly engrossing. Amid the tumultuous start to the war, these ordinary British people are by turns apprehensive and despairing, spirited and cheerful - and always fascinatingly, vividly real.
  • Published: 15 September 2006
  • ISBN: 9780091903879
  • Imprint: Ebury Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $37.99
Categories:

About the author

Simon Garfield

Simon Garfield is an award-winning feature writer on the Observer and author of two previous books of oral history, both highly acclaimed. His study of Aids in Britain, The End of Innocence, was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and the bestselling Mauve was described by the Daily Telegraph as 'a book about science which also happens to be a miniature work of art'. Simon's The Last Journey of William Huskisson, was a Radio 4 Book of the Week.

Also by Simon Garfield

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Praise for We Are At War

It's always easy to imagine people in this period becalmed in a sepia-toned limbo. This book tells the messy, but far more interesting, truth

Time Out

One closes the books with the odd sense of saying farewell to a group of interesting and interestingly different individuals one might have encountered on a long journey

Sunday Times

A fascinating account of everyday life in Britain

Good Housekeeping

A mesmerising read

BBC History

Vibrant, lyrical and engrossing

Daily Express

Wonderful stuff

Sunday Times

Few books have so successfully stepped inside the minds of the British people during wartime

Metro

Fascinating, delightful, illuminating. The diarists soon become like old friends ... and make our wartime past seem no more distant than yesterday

Mail on Sunday

I love these diaries. They have the attraction of being stories, but REAL stories - better than any novel

Margaret Forster
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