good blitz novels?

Yes, I'm basically using ILB to crowdsource x-mas presents: my partner has become really interested in novels about London during the blitz, female authors a plus. Any recommendations? The only one I've read is London Belongs To Meby Norman Collins.

I don't know but there's a new BBC One television series about the Blitz .. though it may be a repeat of one from last year (here are some clips - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06bndj0/clips )

Henry Green, "Caught". Amazing book, nothing like you might expect though, the Blitz is almost an afterthought.

It’s ostensibly aimed at mid teen readers but I have a soft spot for Susan Cooper’s Dawn of Fear.

I have fond memories of The Woven Path by Robin Jarvis, but that is also YA fiction

I mean at this point we might as well just go the whole Blitzcat* hog

*Westall's books are almost all set in the North East and I actually forget if this is too

Yeah Caught is the one to go through. Written during the war so the whole *mythology* of the Blitz had yet to build up, and that's immediately obvious.

parts of "Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson take place during the blitz

The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell includes a surprisingly powerful sequence set during the blitz, but of course gains much of its power from involving characters we've encountered in the previous volumes.

Mother London by Michael Moorcock is a great read, many voices experiencing the Blitz.

and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day.

connie willis' blackout/all clear won the hugo and nebula awards in 2010

i thought the blitz parts were very good; the time-travel story surrounding them was over-long and overwrought

The first part of Gravity's Rainbow

As mentioned in the WAYR thread, Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene was written in 1942-43 and the blitz is fairly prominent in it. Penelope Fitzgerald's BBC novel, Human Voices, takes place mostly during the Phony War period just before the blitz, but the blitz is underway by the end of it.

Has she read Barbara Pym? She wrote after WWII, but her novels bear witness to the effects of the war. And she is the best!!!

The first part of Gravity's Rainbow

― Frederik B, Monday, 13 November 2017 16:43 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No. 1945 != the Blitz

bombs falling on London = the Blitz

think that comes up in GR at some point

The Elisabeth Jane Howard Cazalets series, starting with ‘The Light Years’ runs right through the period.

The Blitz was a German bombing offensive against Britain in 1940 and 1941, during the Second World War.

V rockets were a sort of insane Hail Mary long after conventional bombing had ceased

No blackout, no air raid shelters, no warning. Death dropped from the sky or it didn't. Nothing like the Blitz. I could go on

My mistake! Would have thought v2s would have fallen under the blitzkrieg umbrella

The V-1s and V-2s that fell on London were long after the blitz. The blitz was waves of German bombers dropping bombs night after night for months. The rocket bombs were very sparse compared to the blitz bombings and functioned more as a terror weapon.

One for the shockingly old thread - I am the opposite of a war nerd tbh

The V2 rockets started in 1944, but I get the point. I'm pretty sure I've seen it described as the second blitz, but that might have been in Gravity's Rainbow itself.

Human Voices is wonderful and ticks your "female authors" box

and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day.

― by the light of the burning Citroën
Haven't read her novels, but several phases of WWII as experienced on the UK homefront (if you can incl. bombed areas in such a designation)are in the 1940s (also to some extent before and after) layers of The Collected Stories (the hardback edition with the gold letters on royal blue anyway; there may be another version that's shorter). Some characters try/have to adapt their hive lives, especially working and drinking and schmoozing, running for advancement and just to keep in place and now not to get blown up or freak out if somebody else does---which would and was and will have been terrible, but talk it through 'til we talk through it, just enough and carry on---others feel like everything's changing, and want and/or don't want to act accordingly---

Thanks for the recommendations everyone!