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 Drawing on a multitude of sources, many previously unpublished, she tells the story of those six gruelling years in voices from the Orkney Islands to Cornwall, from the Houses of Parliament to the Nottinghamshire mines.
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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.
humorous and deeply moving
In a book replete with treasures, everyone will find a special jewel.
Juliet Gardiner's book is ...wonderfully readable
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.
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.
Irresistably unputdownable
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.
utterly gripping
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.
Plenty of nostalgia and war-time spirit in this comprehensive account of life on the Home Front