The Air Raid Book Club(93)
We look forward to welcoming you to the next meeting of Bingham’s Book Club at our Beechwood branch on Thursday, 15 January, at seven o’clock. We will be discussing the new spy novel A Shot in the Dark, by Philip du Champ, which, as many of you know, is the pen name of Gertie Bingham’s old friend Charles Ashford.
We would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a happy, blessed, and peaceful Christmas.
Yours,
Florence and Nicholas Hope
Bingham’s Book Club Recommends
Treasured Classics
The Arabian Nights
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Regency Buck by Georgette Heyer
Grimm’s Folk Tales by the Brothers Grimm
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Thrilling Stories
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Excellent Capers
The Lord Peter Wimsey detective series by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse
Children’s Favorites
Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Adventures of Gertie and Arno by Hedy Fischer, illustrated by Elizabeth Chambers
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers
Historical Resources
This story was inspired by a wealth of research, most of which was carried out remotely because of the pandemic. The following
proved particularly useful:
Books
Millions Like Us: Women’s Lives in the Second World War by Virginia Nicholson (Penguin, 2012)
The Truth About Bookselling by Thomas Joy (Pitman, 1964)
1939: A People’s History by Frederick Taylor (Picador, 2020)
Blitz Spirit: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times, compiled by Becky Brown from the Mass Observation Archive (Hodder and Stoughton, 2020)
Films/TV
WW2: I Was There (BBC Studios, 2019)
Blitz Spirit with Lucy Worsley (BBC, 2021)
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, written and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris (Sabine Films Skywalker United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2000)
Websites
Imperial War Museums (iwm.org.uk)
WW2 People’s War (bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar)
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my agent, Laura Macdougall, who when I told her about the idea for this book said, “How quickly can you write it?” She is always supportive, always honest, and always brilliant. Thanks also to Olivia Davies for her wisdom and encouragement. Huge thanks to the wider team at United Agents for their help in bringing this book to life, especially Lucy Joyce for answering my many questions and Amy Mitchell and the brilliant foreign rights team.
Thank you to Emily Krump and the team at William Morrow in the U.S., who published Eudora with such love and care and are now showing the same for Gertie and Hedy.
Thank you to Sherise Hobbs for sharing my vision for this book and to everyone at Headline for their enthusiasm and passion.
Thank you to my publishers around the world who read Gertie and Hedy’s story and got it straightaway. You are all now official members of Bingham’s Book Club.
Many thanks to Catherine Flynn, senior archivist at the Penguin Random House Archive, who sent me an incredible amount of valuable information about the history of bookselling; to Lindsay Ould, borough archivist at the Museum of Croydon, who pointed me toward the wonderful local Ward’s Directories, which led me to find the equally wonderful local Kelly’s Directories; to Raphaelle Broughton at Hatchards, who recommended Thomas Joy’s fascinating book The Truth About Bookselling; to Melissa Hacker, the president of the Kindertransport Association, who gave me lots of information and further resource references; and to the Bromley Gloss Facebook page community, who offered photos and facts about local history and bookshops.