Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in the Second World War - Hardcover

Nicholson, Virginia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670917788 ISBN 13: 9780670917785

Publisher: Viking, 2011

Synopsis

In 1942 Cora Johnston is grieving over the death of her young husband, torpedoed in the Atlantic; Aileen Morris is intercepting Luftwaffe communications during the siege of Malta - and Clara Milburn, whose son was captured after Dunkirk, is waiting, and waiting ...

We tend to see the Second World War as a man's war, featuring Spitfire crews and brave deeds on the Normandy beaches. But in conditions of "Total War" millions of women - in the Services and on the Home Front - demonstrated that they were cleverer, more broad-minded and altogether more complex than anyone had ever guessed.

In Millions Like Us Virginia Nicholson tells the story of the women's war, through a host of individual women's experiences. She tells how they loved, suffered, laughed, grieved and dared; how they re-made their world in peacetime. And how they would never be the same again ...

About this title

Review:

A deeply moving account of female courage both at home and overseas during the six brutal years of war...the joy of Virginia Nicholson's book is the way she has plaited scores of individual stories into a richly textured account of the many forms that female courage can take. This story belongs to us all (Kathryn Hughes The Mail On Sunday)

Vividly entertaining, uplifting and humbling, Millions Like Us deserves to be a bestseller (Bel Mooney The Daily Mail)

Passionate, fascinating, profoundly sympathetic (Artemis Cooper Evening Standard)

Where Nicholson scores over other histories and memoirs is that her vivid narrative is set firmly in the context of the social conventions of the time...this lovely book is poignant, hilarious and inspiring (Edwina Currie The Times)

An acclaimed account of this period... a rich seam of social history (Cassandra Jardine The Daily Telegraph)

Ambitious, humane and absorbing (Anne Chisholm Spectator)

About the Author:

Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and grew up in Yorkshire and Sussex. She studied at Cambridge University and lived abroad in France and Italy, then worked as a documentary researcher for BBC Television. Her books include the acclaimed social histories Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War, and Millions Like Us: Women's Lives During the Second World War, all published by Penguin. She is married to a writer, has three children and lives in Sussex.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0670917788
• ISBN 13: 9780670917785
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 528