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Simon Garfield

Private Battles

  • Private Battles

  • In Private Battles, award-winning writer Simon Garfield has skilfully interwoven the diaries of four ordinary people as they struggle to cope with the day-to-day reality of life during the Second World War. Their voices combine to create one of the most compelling and refreshing takes on the period ever published.

    Meet Maggie Joy Blunt, a perceptive but frustrated young writer living alone near Slough. Pam Ashford, a shipping clerk in Glasgow who writes of office life as if it were an episode of The Archers. Edward Stebbing, a 20-year-old discharged soldier living with a stern landlady in Essex. And Ernest Van Someren, a research chemist in Hertfordshire, father of two children and proposer of several unique scientific ways to beat the Nazis.

    Perhaps here, for the first time, is the true story of how the ordinary people of Britain won the Second World War. And of how we almost didn't.

We Are At War
We Are At War
Simon Garfield
Our Hidden Lives
Our Hidden Lives
Simon Garfield

Simon Garfield is an award-winning feature writer on the Observer and author of two previous books of oral history, both highly acclaimed. His study of Aids in Britain, The End of Innocence, was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and the bestselling Mauve was described by the Daily Telegraph as 'a book about science which also happens to be a miniature work of art'. Simon's The Last Journey of William Huskisson, was a Radio 4 Book of the Week.

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