The Little Wartime Library by Kate Thompson - set in an underground library in Bethnal Green

Title: The Little Wartime Library
Author: Kate Thompson
Publication: Hachette, audiobook, 2023
Narrator: Sarah Durham
Genre: Historical Fiction
Setting: WWII London

Description: When a bomb destroyed the Bethnal Green Library on the first night of the Blitz in 1940, thousands of books were lost.  However, there was a half-completed Tube station nearby and, over the next year, it was transformed into an underground shelter, built over the boarded-up subway tracks, complete with a small library for East Enders needing distraction from war worries. In this novel, based on a real-life underground library, widowed Clara Button, a trained librarian, rises to the challenge of creating a library that is a haven for families, some of whom have lost everything. Clara provides emotional support as well as books, along with an assistant, her outspoken friend Ruby Munroe. Clara and Ruby are grieving for lost family members so the library provides a much-needed distraction for them too. But when a new library supervisor begins to worry that the women taking shelter are getting dangerous ideas from books about standing up for themselves, he begins a campaign to remove Clara and censor the collection. It will take a village of displaced but determined Londoners to save the Bethnal Green Underground Library.

My Impression: Well, what do you do when someone writes a book about WWII and libraries? You get the book twice! Although I commented recently that I feel I am being manipulated by so many books set in bookstores and I keep trying to get a break from WWII, there are fewer novels set in libraries and this one caught my eye. I ordered the audiobook via Libby and did not even recall I had bought the book at a library book sale a month or so earlier. While there is a predictable roller coaster of emotions as the war progresses and characters are killed off, the book vividly portrays the personalities of Clara, Ruby, and many of the library patrons, an appealing group who band together to survive difficult times with humor and affection.

Clara is mourning her husband who died after Dunkirk and Ruby a sister who was trampled to death in a Tube accident but they are not spared additional stress and worry, in part caused by their dangerous, if admirable, determination to entertain and educate their patrons:

The woman lowered her voice to an almost comic whisper. “Do you have a book that might help a couple in the . . . ” Here she mouthed the words, “bedroom department.”

Ruby smiled and reached under the counter. When the library was above ground, they kept all their more inflammatory books locked in a cupboard, but here lack of space dictated they be kept under the counter.

“How about this?” Ruby said, sliding out The Sex Factor in Marriage.

Ruby barely had time to stamp it before the woman bunded it into her string bag . . .

One of my favorite parts of the book is when saucy Ruby, who had forgotten a fling with an American soldier until he turned up again, is trying to get rid of him so gives him an assignment to find ten copies of Gone With the Wind, a new bestseller in scarce quantity, for the library’s book group. If he can do it, she’ll go on another date with him. Later, Clara, desperate also for books for children, writes to the Toronto Public Library for donations. An appeal goes out and books start arriving from every part of Canada, many with notes of encouragement. The book includes an author’s note describing the interviews she conducted, both of wartime survivors and of present-day librarians, as well as a historical note on the real Bethnal Green underground library. Thompson is a kindred spirit: she admits she was a Malory Towers fan and bemoans the funding crises faced by many libraries today.

The thirst for books by the families in the underground shelter and the young women at the factories reminded me of the first year of the pandemic when libraries in the United States rallied to provide books we could pick up safely/remotely. In retrospect, the three-day waiting period to “sanitize” them was unnecessary (and drove me crazy when I was waiting) but those librarians risked contagion to make sure we got our books.

Source: Library and personal copy. This is my twenty-seventh book for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge hosted by The Intrepid Reader, although I think if I get around to counting I have read quite a few more than that.