Becoming Alice — Wendy Robertson

The story of three ordinary people in the extraordinary Decade that follows 1941. As the bombs fall around her Ruth Kelman gives birth to her daughter Alice in a Tyneside cellar. A thousand miles away, Louis Roxby, a young English soldier adjusts to the severe strictures and strange opportunities of prison camp life. Between 1941 and 1951 these three become who they will be. Alice Kelman becomes a northern grammar school girl; Ruth becomes a skilled photographer and Louis Roxby becomes, in turn,a forger, an artist, and a teacher, finally to enjoying the freedom of post-war bohemian London. Then in 1951, their paths cross as, like millions of others, they are drawn like iron filings to a magnet to the celebratory Festival of Britain in London's South Bank. Becoming Alice is the first of three short novels spanning the second part of the Twentieth Century. “Novelist Wendy Robertson at her consummate best. Once again - as in ‘Long Journey Home' and ‘Writing at the Maison Bleue' -she paints on a big canvas, brilliantly welding together the broad sweep of history and the fine detail of individual experience.”