The Happy Prisoner by Monica Dickens was first published in 1946.

Oliver North has been badly wounded in World War 2. He has had a leg amputated and his stump wasn’t healing well, the explosion has also damaged his heart, but he’s back at home now, although stuck in bed as he isn’t well enough to cope with the exercises required for his rehabilitation. It’s a frustrating situation for a previously healthy and active young man, but his bedroom becomes a bit of a hub for his family and he has an attractive  nurse, Elizabeth who attends to him.

It’s a farming community and Oliver hopes to eventually be able to take over the running of the family farm, but meanwhile all of his relatives are in and out of his room telling him of their problems, and he tries to advise them, not always successfully.

His sister Heather’s marriage is in trouble and the return of her husband who had been a prisoner in Japan has not gone well, and his tomboyish sister Violet looks like she’ll be making a disaster of a marriage too.

So it’s a time of upheaval for almost everyone in the family. The war has come to an end at last and people have to adjust to their new life, but there’s also a lot of comedy in this book and the author’s description of a beautiful moth on the first page had me hooked from the start.

I had first  read and enjoyed a few books by Monica Dickens (great-granddaughter of Charles) back in the 1970s, then a couple more over the last decade or so, so it was about time I got around to reading more.

Apparently she volunteered for the Samaritans and when she married an American and moved to the US she set up the first American branch of the Samaritans in Boston, Massachusets.