Paris '44 - The Shame and the Glory: by Patrick Bishop

 Full disclosure: someone gave this to my husband for his birthday. It joined a fairly hefty to-be-read pile, and so I decided to liberate it and read it first. I don't think he minded.

I've read quite a lot of books about the Second World War. I probably would have anyway - how can you not be interested in all the stories that emerge from such a conflict? - but my particular interest arose when I decided to write a book inspired by - but not a faithful account of - my father's experiences as a prisoner of war for five years. It's not yet been published (interested publishers, please form an orderly queue) - but even if it never is, I don't regret the years of research I put into it. I visited Kew Records Office and the Imperial War Museum, I was enthralled by the many accounts in the BBC's People's War archive, and I read many books. The ones I enjoyed most - probably because I'm not an academic or a trained historian - were the ones that told their story by focusing on individual lives. Books such as Dunkirk, The Men They Left Behind, by Sean Longden, Home Run, by John Nichol and Tony Rennell, and, by the same authors, The Last Escape (this last was particularly relevant for my book, because it was about the experience of prisoners of war, and particularly about the terrible march they were forced to make in the bitter winter of 1945, ahead of the advancing Soviet armies - my father took part in this. It's a marvellous book.)

Patrick Bishop's book is called Paris '44 - but it's about much more than that particular point in time. It's about what led up to it - about what it was like in France, and particularly Paris, during the occupation. Like the others I've mentioned, it uses the stories of individuals to tell the story, as well as focusing on the well-known leading figures: de Gaulle, Petain, General Eisenhower, Hitler himself, and people such as is J D Salinger, who took part in the liberation of France; Ernest Hemingway, who just seemed to love being wherever a war was - and Picasso, who emerges as a fairly ambiguous figure in his method of navigating the war. But there are many other less-well-known people, whose stories help to show what a complex business it was living through the Occupation: was it better to be a hero, at the risk of endangering many innocent lives (notoriously, when the Resistance shot a German, many more French people were executed in retaliation) - or to keep your head down and compromise? Easy to judge from the outside, perhaps - less so if you had to live through it. The subtitle hints at this complex picture: there is shame as well as glory. 

It's a fascinating story, as readable as any novel. As a companion piece, I'd recommend Anne Sebba's Les Parisiennes, a fascinating book about the women of Paris during the 1940s.

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

 I've decided that from now on, I'll begin with a bit of context as to how I came to read each book. I find that my reaction to a book is very much affected by all sorts of external circumstances - mood, place, time of year, who recommended it etc. Do you find that? Would be interested to know - do put something in the comments!

So I read Shrines of Gaiety whilst staying with my son and his partner, both of whom are voracious readers and tend to have books I haven't come across. They live in Brussels, and I only visit once or twice a year, so there are always new books to dive into and read while they are at work and the grandchildren are at school.

This jumped out at me from the shelf firstly because it was a hardback with a striking blue cover, and second because it was by Kate Atkinson, a writer whose books I've always enjoyed. I particularly like her dry humour - very much in evidence in her Jackson Brodie books: detective stories with a difference.

This sounded as if it was going to be another detective novel, albeit set in the 1920s. It has a DCI, as all self-respecting detective novels do. This one is called John Frobisher. He is well-intentioned, with a moral compass set in the right direction - but he turns out to be rather a lost soul, gloomy and hapless. He has flashes of inspiration, but somehow nothing ever quite works out for him - so he's not a typically charismatic and clever lead character.

The real star of the book is one Nellie Croker. When we first see her, she is being released from Holloway. She's small, dumpy and middle-aged - but she's also a powerful figure in the 1920s London underworld, and is considerably tougher than a pair of old boots. She runs a number of nightclubs - on one occasion a fight breaks out which develops into total mayhem - but when Nellie appears and shouts at them, calm instantly descends. (I've known teachers like that. I once had a very difficult group. It was last lesson on a Thursday afternoon, and all was not calm. Then a certain senior teacher walked in with a message: he didn't have to say anything, he just glanced round, and suddenly, magically, I had a classful of little angels...)

Anyway, back to Nellie. Her empire is under threat from various quarters, and DCI Frobisher is interested. Into the mix comes our second heroine, a cool and capable librarian from Yorkshire called Gwendolen Kelling, who comes to London in search of two missing girls, Freda and Florence. We, the readers, know what these two are up to - and we also know that other young girls have gone missing, and that they are in danger, though we don't know from whom.

Nellie has quite a few children, the eldest of whom, called Niven, is a veteran of the Great War. He's an interesting character. Tough, charismatic, very capable - he's really everything you would kind of expect the lead detective to be. Niven and Frobisher are both drawn to Gwendolen... so you can see that here is a mix of characters with great potential to create interesting story lines.

The glittering, tawdry world of 1920s London is vividly evoked, with its desperately bright young things, its war-weary veterans, its determination to have fun at any cost. The story twists and turns like a thief threading his/her way through the murky alleyways of the great city itself - and it's told with Kate Atkinson's trademark crispness and dry humour. Really, a very good read.