Blurb
The newest novel by the brilliant Lissa Evans, a historical fiction tale about a family
and their country house needing to change with the times in the aftermath of the Second World War.
It’s 1945, and Corporal Valentine Vere-Thissett, aged 23, is on his way home. But ‘home’ is Dimperley, built in the 1500s, vast and dilapidated, up to its eaves in debt and half-full of fly-blown taxidermy and dependent relatives, the latter clinging to a way of life that has gone forever.
And worst of all - following the death of his heroic older brother - Valentine is now Sir Valentine, and is responsible for the whole bloody place.
To Valentine, it’s a millstone; to Zena Baxter, who has never really had a home before being evacuated there with her small daughter, it’s a place of wonder and sentiment, somewhere that she can’t bear to leave. But Zena has been living with a secret, and the end of the war means she has to face a reckoning of her own…
Funny, sharp and touching, Small Bomb at Dimperley is both a love story and a bittersweet portrait of an era of profound loss, and renewal.
Review
When I read a book like Small Bomb at Dimperley, I don't expect to be laughing out loud one minute and sobbing the next. But that is exactly what I did.
This book has everything you need for a cosy holiday read, and that's exactly what it was for me. I loved Irene and Barbara, although I felt immensely sorry for Barbara during the book. Her daughters are typical of that age, trying to find themselves in a world where life has changed irrevocably but also wanting everything to be the same as it was before.
Zena has to be my favourite character though, how she has coped being a single mum to Allison witha husband who is nowhere to be seen for years. I genuinely loved hearing her story and how the relationship between her and Valentine develop. Valentine is a dear and so very unsuited to life at Dimperley, but he was never meant for the life that his older brother had.
This book was one of my favourites and I loved how everything came together at the end - and also that Irene steadfastly refused to change her ways! A fantastic book and I canno wait to see what Lissa does next.
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