Business as Usual

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September, 1931: Hilary Fane – 27, university graduate, engaged – doesn’t need to work. Much against the advice of her family and fiancé, she takes a job as a clerk at the Everyman’s department store in Oxford Street.

Writing letters home to Edinburgh, Hilary tells of the scrapes she gets into with tricky customers and colleagues – including ineffectual Miss Hopper and her nemesis Miss Sparling.

Yet dashing Mr Grant, Head of Publicity, has his eye on Hilary. He moves her to the library, where her good humour and sense aren’t entirely appreciated by all.

Hilary imagines this is just business as usual – but something momentous is shifting inside her. . .

Witty and charming. A book so delightful I burst into tears on finishing it
London Review Bookshop

About Jane Oliver

Jane Oliver was the pen-name of Helen Christina Easson Rees, née Evans (1903–1970), and Ann Stafford was Anne Isabel Stafford Pedler (1900–1966). They met while working at the Times Book Club in London and Business As Usual was published in 1933 near the beginning of careers that would see them become two of the most prolific women writers of the mid-twentieth century. In between their huge output, both women drove ambulances in London during World War Two. After the war they lived either as next-door neighbours or sharing a home in Hampshire. Together, they founded the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in memory of Helen’s husband, also a writer, who died in 1940 on a RAF training flight.

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