

SMALL BOMB AT DIMPERLEY
‘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
‘An irresistible novel….This is Lissa Evans at the peak of her mighty powers’ – India Knight
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.
‘This is better than Wodehouse, in my humble opinion, because it’s believable as well as funny’ – Clare Chambers
‘Funny poignant, perfect period detail…it’s as if Barbara Pym and Evelyn Waugh had a secret love-child…Heaven!’ – Daisy Goodwin
