The Wartime Bookshop

Alice moves to the village of Churchwood with her retired father just as WWII breaks out. She is desperate to be useful but, nursing both an injured hand and a broken heart, she expects her prospects of finding employment are poor, and worries that she won't fit in with her new community.

Kate lives with her family on Brimbles Farm, where her father and brothers treat her no better than a servant. With no mother or sisters, and shunned by the locals, Kate longs for a friend of her own.

Naomi is a wealthy 'take-charge' sort of woman, who is looked up to for owning the best house in the village. But privately, she carries the hurts of childlessness, a husband who has little time for her and a deep-rooted insecurity.

Can starting up The Wartime Bookshop bring these three women, and the community of Churchwood, together?

Lesley Eames has always loved books and writing. She read voraciously as a child and has read voraciously ever since. She also wrote stories as a child although busy careers in law, event organization and then charity fundraising and marketing made finding writing time in adulthood tricky. When she took maternity leave to have her two lovely daughters, she hoped she might find more writing time. Unfortunately, no one told her children, so once again time constraints continued to be a struggle. Now she has the luxury of writing full-time although she mixes this with creative writing tutoring, mentoring and occasional editing.

Lesley has 90 published short stories to her credit alongside four historical sagas set around the time of WW1 and into the Roaring 20s. The Wartime Bookshop is her fifth book and her first venture into the WW2 period. Originally from the north west of England (Manchester), Lesley's home is now Hertfordshire where The Wartime Bookshop's fictional village of Churchwood is set. Along her journey as a writer, Lesley has been thrilled to have enjoyed success in competitions as varied as crime writing to writing for children. She is particularly honoured to have won the Festival of Romance New Talent Award, the Romantic Novelists' Association's Elizabeth Goudge Cup and to have been twice shortlisted in the UK Romantic Novel Awards (RONAs).