From the bestselling author of The Land Girls comes a beautifully realised novel that speaks to the true history and real experiences of post-war Australian women.
Sydney 1945 The war is over, the fight begins.
The war is over and so are the jobs (and freedoms) of tens of thousands of Australian women. The armaments factories are making washing machines instead of bullets and war correspondent Tilly Galloway has hung up her uniform and been forced to work on the women's pages of her newspaper - the only job available to her - where she struggles to write advice on fashion and make-up.
As Sydney swells with returning servicemen and the city bustles back to post-war life, Tilly finds her world is anything but normal. As she desperately waits for word of her prisoner-of-war husband, she begins to research stories about the lives of the underpaid and overworked women who live in her own city. Those whose war service has been overlooked; the freedom and independence of their war lives lost to them.
Meanwhile Tilly's waterside worker father is on strike, and her best friend Mary is struggling to cope with the stranger her own husband has become since being liberated from Changi a broken man. As strikes rip the country apart and the news from abroad causes despair, matters build to a heart-rending crescendo. Tilly realises that for her the war may have ended, but the fight is just beginning...
ARC received from Harper Collins Australia for an honest review
The Women's Pages is another wonderfully written and inspiring story from Victoria Purman.
I am loving reading more Australian historical fiction these days, and Ms Purman's stories are some that I will always read.
Set in Sydney at the end of WW2, we are taken on the journey with Tilly, her best friend Mary and their families as the men come home and the women are again relegated to the life of baby making and cooking for their man (ugh, I don't think I would have survived back then lol).
Tilly is ahead of her time really, with her career in journalism being curtailed by the fact she didn't have a penis. She fought for every chance that was just thrown in the laps of the good ol' boys.
The hope and the heartache of war time is a huge part of this tale, and I turned each page, holding my breath for what was going to happen next.
Ms Purman has painted a vivid picture of war time Sydney, and had me thinking about what my grandparents went through in the early days of their marriage. I love reading a story that draws me right in like that.
I loved where Tilly's story ended up, and smiled at something I was hoping for the whole time I was reading.
Beautiful writing, enthralling story, I hope to read more from Ms Purman in the future;
Victoria Purman is an Australian top ten and USA Today bestselling fiction author. Her most recent bestseller, The Land Girls, was published in April 2019. The Last of the Bonegilla Girls, a novel based on her mother's post-war migration to Australia, was published in 2018. Her previous novel The Three Miss Allens became a USA Today bestseller in April 2019. She is a regular guest at writers festivals, a mentor and workshop presenter and was a judge in the fiction category for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.
To find out more, visit Victoria on her website.
You can also follow her on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
