LITERARY FICTION

. Dear Mrs Bird by AJ Pearce. Published by Picador for £12.99

IT IS 1940 and London is gearing up for conflict.

Hoping to become a war correspondent, the delightful Emmeline finds herself instead working as an assistant to the agony aunt on a woman’s magazine.

Many readers are writing in, desperate for advice on dealing with grief, the struggle to look good, overbearing relatives and the thorny question of ‘how far to go’.

Yet Emmeline’s twinset-clad bully of a boss, Mrs Bird, refuses to answer letters that contain ‘Unpleasantness’.

Aghast at this near-cruelty and short-sightedness, Emmeline takes matters into her own hands, with surprising results.

What a lovely, cheering novel this is. Skewering snobbery and prudishness with the lightest of touches, it also portrays the difficulties of the home front. Poignant and realistic.

One small criticism: a need for more letters.

. Colonel Belchamp’s Battlefield Tour by Adrian Crisp. Published by Matador for £7.99

THE death of his young son has left consultant physician James Butland barely able to function. But, in the spring of 1964, he takes a tour to the French battlefields of 1940, where he once fought with the Queen Victoria Rifles.

Memories return: of his schooldays, his struggle to get a place at Oxford and his call-up into a war where he finds himself engaged in the doomed defence of Calais against the Nazis.

Wounded and concussed, he stumbles into a doctor’s surgery and is tended to by medical student Agnes – a meeting that profoundly affects his life both then and when they meet years later.

James’s war experiences have inflicted damage, which the doctor in him assesses clearly. No conventional gung-ho hero, he is a man who has struggled with depression and self-doubt.

His portrayal is honest and raw in this impressive debut by Crisp, who is himself a distinguished medical consultant and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

. Panic Room by Robert Goddard. Published by Bantam Press for £18.99

EDUCATED at Cambridge, Robert Goddard spent ten frustrating years as a local government officer, before writing Past Caring in 1986, which became an instant bestseller.

Panic Room is Goddard’s 27th outing and it is as compelling as any he has written.

Set in Cornwall, where he now lives, it centres on a supremely modern house set high above a cove.

It is theoretically the property of the wife of a disgraced pharmaceuticals tycoon, who wants to sell it, although it’s inhabited by a mysterious young woman named Blake.

But there is a twist. The house has a panic room, carefully hidden and complete with a steel lining – apparently closed from within. Could someone be hiding in it?

Splendidly serpentine and immaculately plotted, this is British thriller writing at its very best.