An agony aunt’s wartime mission

DEAR MRS BIRD by AJ Pearce (Picador £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 twinsetclad 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.

My one small criticism: I wanted more letters.

CIRCE by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury £16.99) DAUGHTER of Helios, the Titan sun god, Circe struggles with

her divinity, preferring mortals and herbal witchcraft (pharmaka) forbidden to the gods.

Banished by Zeus to the island of Aiaia for casting a spell, Circe learns how to survive and deepen her skill.

But the many who are lured to the island, including Jason and Odysseus, also bring notoriety and danger.

The author’s first novel, The Song Of Achilles, won the Orange Prize for Fiction and this is a fabulous follow-up.

Bold and sensuously written, it plays brilliantly with the original myth of Circe, who turned men into swine. This Circe takes risks, falls in love, is fearful and suffers, while asking what it means to be alive.

COLONEL BELCHAMP’S BATTLEFIELD TOUR by Adrian Crisp (Matador £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’s 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.