Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality. Her original black comedy (Crooked Heart) concerned Vee, a middle-aged suburban scammer, and the prodigiously bright but orphaned Noel, who join forces in north London’s urban village during the second world war. Evans then went back in time to tell the story of Noel’s Suffragist godmother Mattie founding a disastrous girls’ club on Hampstead Heath during the 1930s (Old Baggage). In V for Victory, the story moves forward again.
It’s 1944, and Hitler’s rockets are falling all over London. Mattie is dead. Vee is pretending to be Noel’s aunt and running an eccentric boarding-house in Mattie’s Hampstead home (left to Noel). One of Mattie’s former pupils, Winnie, is now an air raid warden, pulling civilians from bombed-out buildings.
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