Emerging out of the 1940-1941 London Blitz, the drama of these two short works by Inez Holden, a novel and a memoir, comes from the courage and endurance of ordinary people met in the factories, streets and lodging houses of a city under bombardment.
Business As Usual is a delightful illustrated novel in letters from Hilary Fane, an Edinburgh girl fresh out of university who is determined to support herself by her own earnings in London for a year, despite the mutterings of her surgeon fiancee.
This new edition of England is My Village, and The World Owes Me A Living by John Llewelyn Rhys (1911-1940) is a stunning rediscovery of this brilliant writer. 'Had he lived,' an obituary noted, 'he might have become the Kipling of the RAF.'
Robert Owen is the only son from a Welsh vicarage, now a brilliant pilot and flying instructor, recently of the Royal Air Force. He has taken a new job at the flying school at Best, a prosperous cathedral town in England. Robert's skills as a pilot and in diplomacy with pupils with delusions about their competence are tested to their limits.
John Buchan's 1932 novel The Gap in the Curtain was his last full-length work devoted to exploring a supernatural theme: if you were able to see one year into the future, what would you do with that foreknowledge? And what would it do to you?