After five years of dark, Nell Cutler wanted a wedding. A proper one. The kind you plan because you believe in the future.
The autumn of 1944 brings something the women of Sparrow Street have not permitted themselves to feel for five long years: real, bright, fragile hope. The Allies are winning. Paris is liberated. The blackout is easing, a thin strip of light allowed back into London's streets for the first time since 1939. And Nell Cutler — who has run this corner shop through the worst of it, who has held this street together through the Blitz and the grey middle years and more loss than any woman should carry — looks at her found-again daughter Margaret, glowing with her David, and announces that what Sparrow Street needs now is a wedding.
A proper wartime wedding, planned for November, with a real cake and real flowers and the whole street gathered to celebrate — because after five years of snatching joy in the dark between the bombs, they are going to plan a joy, a whole full certain future joy, and they are going to believe in it.
But the war is not quite done, and it reminds them of that. The V-weapons come — first the doodlebugs, droning and cutting out, then the V-2 rockets falling without warning from a clear sky — and the street behind Sparrow Street vanishes in an instant, and three weeks before the wedding David Ross runs toward the rubble.
And still, the wedding comes. Because that is what the women of Sparrow Street do: they hold on, and they come through, and they celebrate the joy that love insists on, even now, even here, even in the last spiteful months of a five-year war.
A Wedding on Sparrow Street is the seventh book in The Sparrow Street Girls World War Two saga — the most joyful and hopeful book in the series. A wartime wedding story, a testament to the love that endures the unendurable, and the first bright light of the peace that is finally, really, coming.
A historical saga for fans of Dilly Court, Ellie Dean, and Annie Groves — and for anyone who has held on through the long dark and believed, against everything, that the dawn was coming.
It is never too late for joy. Nell Cutler toasted the whole street on that November day, and the whole street believed her. The peace was coming. The lads were coming home. And after five years of dark, the light was nearly there.
