Their Finest Hour and a Half

by Lissa Evans, Doubleday, 416pp, £14.99, Week Bookshop £13.49 (incl. p&p). "This is the truest and most enjoyable novel about home-front life I’ve read," said Christopher Fowler in the Independent on Sunday. It's 1940, and Catrin Cole, drafted into the Ministry of Information to give a feminine angle to their propaganda films, is assigned to the story of a pair of twin sisters who brought back 54 stranded soldiers from Dunkirk in a stolen fishing boat. On examination, the truth of their escapade is rather less impressive. Even so, a cast of has-beens and incompetents is assembled to bring it to the screen. The book is "a joy" - "touching and hilarious".

"This is a comic novel, but far warmer in tone and broader in scope than that label would suggest," said Kate Saunders in the Times. The period details, such as the propaganda scripts, are "gloriously observed" and the whole thing is "delicious". Evans's "brisk way with plot makes the pages turn, but there are perhaps too many incidents, too many crises," said Colin Greenland in the Guardian. At its best, though, "it illuminates not just the deprivations but also the liberations of the War years".

FIRST POSTED APRIL 3, 2009