Victory on Sparrow Street

She was pegging out the washing when the war began. She was standing in Nell's shop when it ended. And between those two moments, she had become someone she had never imagined — and everything she had ever wanted was finally, truly, coming home.

The news comes over the wireless on an ordinary spring evening in May 1945: Germany has surrendered. The war in Europe is over. And Grace Bellamy, who has waited five and a half years for these words, stands quite still in her little kitchen as the mending slides from her lap, and can only think one thing: Tom's coming home. For good. Forever.

She runs to Nell's shop — of course she does, it is where Sparrow Street runs when the news is too big to bear alone — and finds the whole street already gathering, women weeping and laughing and holding each other, saying it over and over as if to make it real: it's over. We won. It's over at last. And Nell Cutler, who has held this street together through the whole long war and the war before it, stands behind her counter with tears streaming down her broad grey face and raises her hands and says, in a voice shaking with six years of held-back feeling: "Well, girls. We did it. We came through."

What follows is VE Day itself — the great table in the street, the dancing, the music, and then, one by one through that glorious long day, the soldiers of Sparrow Street coming home. And the harder, quieter, more important thing that follows the celebration: the real homecoming, the patient loving work of helping men come home not just in body but in heart, of learning each other again across the distance the war has made.

Victory on Sparrow Street is the eighth book in The Sparrow Street Girls World War Two saga — the triumphant, deeply felt, emotionally complete conclusion to the wartime years of Sparrow Street. A story about VE Day, about homecoming, about the women who held the home front through the whole long war and now win the harder, quieter victory of the peace — and about Grace and Tom, who dreamed of their after for six long years, and are finally, truly, living it.

A historical saga for fans of Dilly Court, Ellie Dean, and Rosie Hendry — and for anyone who has ever waited a very long time for the dawn, and found it sweeter than they ever imagined for the waiting.

She waited five and a half years for him to come home. And the whole ordinary lovely life they had dreamed of — the little house, the family, the peace — began at last, in the autumn of 1945, in the first winter of the light coming back on.