by Evans, Lissa | Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) Published 05/09/2024 by Transworld Publishers Ltd (Doubleday) in the United Kingdom Hardback | 320 pages222 x 138mm | 500g 'So incredibly assured and affecting. I loved the world and the characters so much and it just seemed like the perfect novel to be read in such dark times. Joy and love found in the ruins, the hope after the horrors, simply gorgeous - a true balm’ Graham Norton 'Generous, touching and romantic' Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures 'Lissa Evans is a wonderful writer' Jojo Moyes 'Funny, poignant, perfect' Daisy Goodwin, author of My Last Duchess 'An irresistible novel which combines a crumbling once-grand house, bumbling aristos clinging to the pre-war past, and the magnificent Zena Baxter. This is Lissa Evans at the peak of her mighty powers' India Knight, bestselling author of My Life on a Plate It's 1945, and Corporal Valentine Vere-Thissett, aged 23, is on his way home. But ‘home’ is Dimperley, built in the 1500s, vast and dilapidated, up to its eaves in debt and half-full of fly-blown taxidermy and dependent relatives, the latter clinging to a way of life that has gone forever. And worst of all - following the death of his heroic older brother - Valentine is now Sir Valentine, and is responsible for the whole bloody place. To Valentine, it’s a millstone; to Zena Baxter, who has never really had a home before being evacuated there with her small daughter, it’s a place of wonder and sentiment, somewhere that she can’t bear to leave. But Zena has been living with a secret, and the end of the war means she has to face a reckoning of her own…Funny, sharp and touching, Small Bomb at Dimperley is both a love story and a bittersweet portrait of an era of profound loss, and renewal.
