In the original dustsheet. Green cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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Through the diaries of nine men and women, We Shall Never Surrender tells the story of the war as they experienced it, whether at home struggling simply to keep going, in high office with direct influence on its outcome, or protesting against it. Some of them, like Alan Brooke, who became Chief of the General Staff, the politician Harold Nicolson or the pacifist writer Vera Brittain, are well known. Others Anne Garnett, the wife of a country solicitor, George Beardmore, a young husband and father with ambitions to become a novelist, or Clara Milburn, a contented wife and mother of an adult son are not. But in their diaries they all together with the diplomat Charles Ritchie, the novelist Naomi Mitchison and the resourceful and frequently unconventional Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly followed the war in their diaries from outbreak to victory. For some, keeping a diary was a way of documenting their hopes and fears for an unforeseen future. For others, it was a way of carefully preserving their lives on the page, uncertain in what state they would find the world the next time they woke. Together they constitute a remarkable record of human endeavour and human cost, at a time when the whole world was locked in conflict and it often seemed that the outcome rested on the shoulders of one small island.

Reviews:

• This book really made me rethink life at home in WW2 – reading through the lives of mostly civilian people including some of those close to top brass, it brought the events of WW2 alive in a fresh way. I realised when reading this, that a lot of what I have read, learned in school, seen in documentaries is high-level analysis rather than any kind of raw and private human account, I felt transported back in time through these very well selected and poignant diary entries to take you on the rollercoaster of events between 1939-45 . Emotions stirred within me, more often with this book than possibly any other I’ve read owing to how the 9 diarists convey war events and personal matters in their entries. I couldn’t help but come to imagine myself in their shoes. I can understand why other reviewers here think that this book should be read in schools. Alongside the diarists, the book narrates so effectively a summary of wider events that keeping pace with the order of things both the progression of the war, and of developments in the diarists lives, is effortless. A book well worth reading.

The story of the Second World War told through the voices of those who lived through it.

• The Authors, in their different careers in teaching and television Penelope Middelboe, Donald Fry and Chris Grace have enjoyed bringing other voices to a wider audience. This is the first book they have produced together. Penelope Middelboe’s previous book was also based on diaries – the journals of her great great aunt Edith Olivier, 1924-48. Together with Chris Grace, she runs the Shakespeare Schools Festival