The Little Wartime Library

Again, this has everything I like in a book, characters I care about, a great page-turning plot, a fight for what’s right, and a beautiful romantic thread.

By amazing coincidence, it’s also about inspiring librarians, two very different women who join forces to bring books to people who need them. Clara Button, recently widowed and under pressure to be respectable, is very different from racy unmarried Ruby Munroe, but the two form a strong bond grounded in mutual respect.

Based on historical fact, it tells the story of the underground library, built in the disused Bethnal Green tube station in… show more.

I found this book stuck in my memory long after I turned the last page. Based loosely on real-life events, it is the story of a war-time bookshop in a London underground station during WW2.

Reading it, I learned a lot about how Londoners sheltered, in fact sometimes lived, in underground stations. The two main characters, Clara and Ruby, are miles apart, but both are fascinating as they struggle to keep the library open despite opposition from the powers that be.

I loved knowing that the inspiration for this story was based on a real wartime library that was tucked away in one of London’s underground tube tunnels. The author did a lot of research, and it shows.

While the characters may be fictitious, real people from the past served as muses to bring them to life. This is one of those books that makes the world around you go away. I felt as if I had really traveled to London and into the past. No detail of everyday life was overlooked, big or small.

I stayed up way too late… show more.