Wave Me Goodbye: Stories of the Second World War (Virago Modern Classics, Band 790)

'This is as stark and acidic a collection of war stories as you will read . . . writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Beryl Bainbridge and Dorothy Parker provide poignant, wry, subversive tales . . . Revelatory reading' Scotsman

This collection of wartime stories includes some of the finest writers of a generation. War had traditionally been seen as a masculine occupation but these stories show how women were equal if different participants. Here, war is less about progress on the frontline of battle than about the daily struggle to keep homes, families and relationships alive; to snatch pleasure from danger, and strength from shared experience. By turn comical, stoical, compassionate, angry and subversive these intensely individual voices bring a human dimension to the momentous events that reverberated around them and each opens a window on to a hidden landscape of war.

'Each voice is individual and unsentimental . . .Molly Lefebure and Margery Sharp write succinctly of the Blitz, while in Miss Anstruther's Letters, Rose Macaulay brilliantly paints spiritual as well as material devastation' Daily Telegraph