Wartime

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780755310289

Price: £10.99

ON SALE: 3rd October 2005

Genre: General & World History / Oral History / Second World War

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Juliet Gardiner’s critically acclaimed book – the first in a generation to tell the people’s story of the Second World War – offers a compelling and comprehensive account of the pervasiveness of war on the Home Front. The book has been commended for its inclusion of many under-described aspects of the Home Front, and alongside familiar stories of food shortages, evacuation and the arrival of the GIs, are stories of Conscientious Objectors, persecuted Italians living in Britain and Lumber Jills working in the New Forest. Drawing on a multitude of sources, many previously unpublished, she tells the story of those six gruelling years in voices from the Orkney Islands to Cornwall, from the Houses of Parliament to the Nottinghamshire mines.

Reviews

Danger, courage, deprivation, exhaustion, fear, humour and that old enemy 'boredom' were endured for six years. This exhilarating book is the voice of these people.
Despatches
humorous and deeply moving
Despatches
In a book replete with treasures, everyone will find a special jewel.
The Times Literary Supplement (David Stafford)
Juliet Gardiner's book is ...wonderfully readable
BBC History Magazine
Juliet Gardiner's 'Wartime' provides a marvellously rich, and often entertaining, recreation of life on the Home Front, 1939-45, drawing on an enormous range of oral testimony and memoir.
The Scotsman
From lost loves to crabby children to the sorrow of receiving the worst possible news, this is a remarkably personal picture of wartime life at home.
The Good Book Guide
Irresistably unputdownable
Scotland On Sunday (Angus Calder)
after the torrents of film and forests of print devoted to her subject over the last four decades, it is exhilarating that Gardiner finds so many under-described aspects of the Home Front to document through her fresh witnesses.
BBC History Magazine
utterly gripping
The Spectator
Gardiner explores every aspect of the British home front, and presents these deeply moving moments superbly. I have no doubt that 'Wartime' will become the seminal work on Britain at war.
Daily Mail (Max Arthur)
Plenty of nostalgia and war-time spirit in this comprehensive account of life on the Home Front
The Veteran