The Girls of Sparrow Street

The morning war was declared, Grace Bellamy had a peg between her teeth and her husband's shirt in her hands. She would remember it for the rest of her life - the exact weight of the ordinary, in the last moment before everything changed.

London, September 1939. Grace is nineteen years old, four months married, and about as happy as a person has any right to be. Tom works the docks. They have two rooms and a yard the size of a pocket handkerchief, and it is everything. And then the wireless cuts out, and a grave voice fills the silence, and the whole of Sparrow Street goes still.

Tom enlists within the week. And Grace Bellamy, who has never worked a day outside her own home, walks through the gates of Fenwick's factory - and finds, in the deafening clattering din of a hundred women bent over their machines, something she has never had before: a wage of her own, a purpose, and the fierce warm sisterhood of women who are all frightened and all holding on and all determined, with every bone in their bodies, not to fall.

Nell, who has run the corner shop through one war already and knows exactly what the women of Sparrow Street will need before they know it themselves. Dot, with her foghorn laugh and her unshakeable warmth, the kind of woman who holds a whole factory floor together. Vera, who makes something out of nothing every single day and calls it ordinary. Rose, tender-hearted and quietly braver than anyone knows. Ivy, barely seventeen, growing up in the wrong years too fast and too magnificently. And old Mrs. Pike, who has already lived through the worst thing, who knows how to wait, and who teaches the young ones everything she knows.

The Girls of Sparrow Street is the first book in a sweeping World War Two saga about ordinary women doing extraordinary things - about the East End of London in the Blitz, about factory floors and air raid shelters and telegram boys on red bicycles, and about the fierce, uncelebrated, unbreakable sisterhood of women who held the home front together while history was made everywhere else.

A deeply felt historical novel for fans of Pam Jenoff, Kate Quinn, and Dilly Court - and for anyone who has ever been held up by a woman who didn't have to stop, but did.

There is no night so dark and no fire so fierce that people who love each other cannot come through it, together, into the morning. Sparrow Street knew that. It just took a war to prove it.