Shelter

'Miss Steen is a superb manipulator of scene, and she makes her places as alive as her people’ - Daily Telegraph

The untold story of life in London during the Second World War

September 1940, London.

Louise is buried underground, metres below the city.

Contained by the corrugated iron of an Anderson shelter, she feels stifled rather than safe.

Stuck with her inside the construction is her husband Jos, who despite attending Oxford and volunteering for the Auxiliary Fire Service, the A.F.S., her friends still dislike.

As if the air wasn’t tense enough with Hitler’s presence made known by incessant bombs, Louise has her fears confirmed; Jos has a mistress.

Camma. The delicate and sweet girl, who Jos can’t help but want to protect.

Even now in the Shelter Jos is itching to escape only to telephone Camma and check she’s unhurt by the fire raining down on London.

But when Louise drops a bomb of her own and tells Jos she’s with child, the dynamic of this love triangle is drastically changed.

Louise tries to distract herself and make herself useful in the war effort; struggling to maintain paid work after her old boss Antony moves to America, she tries to volunteer with the W.V.S.

Wondering through war-torn London she visits her sister Cynthia who’s sending her only son Julian to Canada in order to flee the danger zone.

The belief that Hitler would never target London is quickly fading as all families from the capital are being torn apart.

Just when the city is coming under attack, Louise bumps into Camma, her husband’s mistress.

Constrained by courtesy they dine together and discuss the particulars of their future and the future of the war and it seems they understand each other.

Could an unlikely friendship blossom between wife and mistress?

Shelter is an urgent story of a three-cornered romance in war-torn London during World War Two.

This literary tale fuses together the city’s multitudinous voices, from the green grocer on the street corner, the unemployed middle-class wife to the inspiring speeches of Winston Churchill.

Praise for Marguerite Steen

‘Miss Steen is a superb manipulator of scene, and she makes her places as alive as her people’ - Daily Telegraph

‘Rich and enjoyable’ - The Observer

‘fine scenes and piquant portriats’ - The Sunday Times

‘a vivid narrative’ - Manchester Guardian

‘full of colour and character’ - John o' London's Weekly

‘rich, lavish, violent, passionate’ - Evening News

Marguerite Steen (12 May 1894 – 4 August 1975) was a British writer. Very much at home among creative people, she wrote biographies of the Terrys, of her friend Hugh Walpole, of the 18th century poet and actress (and sometime mistress to the Prince of Wales) Mary 'Perdita' Robinson, and of her own lover, the artist Sir William Nicholson. Her first major success was Matador (1934), for which she drew on her love of Spain, and of bullfighting. Also a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic was her massive saga of the slave-trade and Bristol shipping, The Sun Is My Undoing (1941). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1951. Her two volumes of autobiography, Looking Glass(1966) and Pier Glass (1968) offer some delightful views of the English creative set from the 1920s to the 1950s.

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