Hortense is one of the indomitable characters of fiction – proud, stubborn and deluded, and this novel deservedly won the Orange prize.ģ. Levy’s novel depicts the shock when these postwar arrivals, with romantic ideas about their “home country”, met the racism of a Britain they had admired from afar. Small Island by Andrea Levy In the 80s, living in Brixton, I would see formidable elderly ladies from the Caribbean walking to church in hats and white gloves and I would wonder about their lives. There was only so much wartime spirit left in people and the phrase “we’re all in it together” wore very thin.Ģ. A freakishly cold winter in 1947 may have sealed Labour’s fate. Using Mass Observation diaries, Kynaston uncovers the grinding misery of postwar Britain, carrying its massive debt repayment. Age of Austerity 1 945-51 by David Kynaston The definitive nonfiction work on the postwar period in Britain, a primer for anyone born after the war who grew up with the advantages of the NHS and welfare state wondering why the Labour government lost in 1951. Some of the following books (all but one of them novels) were published at the time some decades later, taking stock of this strange interregnum between war and coronation.ġ. Rationing would continue until the early 50s. In Britain, the lights were still out, the hearth still cold. The US’s postwar literature - Kerouac’s On the Road, Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead – have about them the swaggering self-confidence of young men coming home from Europe to tell their own expansive young men’s stories. The postwar period covers some of the most turbulent times of the century: enormous numbers of refugees trying to return home or find a new country, rising anti-colonial independence movements, the beginnings of the cold war.
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