RETRO READS

THE HOUSE OPPOSITE by Barbara Noble

(Dean Street £9.99, 236 pp) HOW did people live during the London Blitz? Authenticity bursts from every page of noble’s vivid novel, showing how daily life goes on much as usual.

People — a typist in love with her married boss, a youth fearful of being gay, a terrified mother resorting to secret drinking — all focus on the moment, worrying about little concerns.

They visit parks, cinemas, dance halls, cafes . . . against an unrelenting backdrop of imminent bombings and possible annihilation.

They learn to sleep through air raids and to walk along streets echoing with the ‘the crunch and tinkle of shattered glass’. Life goes on. That’s how it really was. Extraordinary.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger

(Penguin £12.99, 240 pp) EVERYONE fell in love with America’s troubled teenager Holden Caulfield in 1951. He introduced us to enticing new words — phoney, sonuvabitch, goddam — and became an instant cult hero to the nation’s book-buying sixth formers. His hilarious first-person rant was certainly one up on the schools’ set-books by Dickens and Wordsworth. Holden, deeply anxious about sex, girls, being a misfit and missing his kid sister, runs away from his posh school, daren’t face his parents and hangs out in new York.

reading Salinger’s masterpiece years later it’s suddenly not so funny; it’s heartbreaking. The bright, chain-smoking boy has severe depression, no one is listening to him and he’s physically ill. It now makes you cry between the laughter.

RULE BRITANNIA by Daphne du Maurier

(Virago £9.99, 336 pp) IT’S Britain 1970; a state of emergency exists after a sudden takeover by USUK — a revolutionary Anglo-American alliance. The Queen is in the White House, the President at Buckingham Palace. In Cornwall, enter the marines — barricades, helicopters, barbed wire — and the stroppy locals spring into action to save their land, led by a dotty grandma with five adopted sons.

‘Those with a spark of fire in their bellies won’t take foreign rule lying down,’ roars a Cornish freedom fighter, and another, whose dog is shot dead by Yankees, warns: ‘The enemy in our midst will destroy our traditions.’ It’s all a bit bonkers and, alas, a far cry from manderley.