Debutante — Anne Melville

This saga features four girls preparing to launch themselves into London Society in 1939. Ronnie is the daughter of an eccentric Duke and Duchess; Peggy aspires to Oxford but yields to familial pressures; Isabelle has Anglo-French issues to resolve; and Anne is beautiful but poor, so obliged to marry well. For all four debutantes the war brings relief from a superficially amusing, although basically stifling existence, but their lives are irrevocably changed more than they could have possibly imagined. They each will learn that the War shall affect more than their "coming-out".