I was sent a digital copy of The Wartime Bookshop by Lesley Eames for review – by Netgalley. The book isn’t really my usual fare but the wartime aspect of it attracted me and I did enjoy it. It’s very early on in WW2.

Alice Lovell has moved to the small village of Churchwood with her father who has just retired as a doctor. The village seems to be run by Naomi Harrington, a lady of a certain age who has set herself up as the most inmportant inhabitant – in her mind anyway. Sadly as she has money a lot of the villagers are happy to take their cue from her, as they are afraid of upsetting her.

Alice has had an accident which means that she doesn’t have much use of one of her hands, she’s very self-conscious about it and dreads people looking at it. The only bright spot in her life is Daniel who had been a neighbour before her father had decided to move to the village. She’s in love with him but won’t really even admit the fact to herself, since her recent accident she doesn’t want him to feel he has to marry her.

In an effort to settle into the village she decides to volunteer at the hospital which is beginning to fill up with injured servicemen. Stuck in bed and not even allowed to go to the loo the men are bored stiff. Alice decides to read to them and almost all of them look forward to her and her reading sessions, but there’s a paucity of reading material. Will Mrs Harrington help or hinder?

This book is light entertainment, sometimes just what you need, although it has its fraught moments as you would expect.

I was glad to be sent a copy of this book by the publisher Transworld via NetGalley.
I was however perplexed by a couple of things. For some weird reason every time there was a double ‘f’ in the middle of a word they were missing and sometimes it was the ffs and an l which were missing. So the word different comes out as dierent, and it’s amazing how many words that a’ects!

Also in my usual nit-picking way I noticed that nurses mentioned how thankful they were that they now had antibiotics to use on their patients. However they weren’t available that early on in the war, pre Dunkirk. 1941 is the important date and even then they were not widely available.