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  • Published: 15 March 2012
  • ISBN: 9780670922086
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

Millions Like Us

Women's Lives in the Second World War





One of the greatest untold stories of British history - the Women's War of WWII and the 6 million British women who helped remake the Britain we live in today

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Virginia Nicholson's Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in the Second World War. A special multi-voice recording featuring five actresses that bring to life the hundreds of personal testimonies, diary entries and books that make up this superb study. Read by Patience Tomlinson, Annie Aldington, Rachel Bavidge, Julie Maisey and Georgina Sutton.

In 1942 Cora Johnston is grieving over the death of her young husband, torpedoed in the Atlantic; Aileen Morris is intercepting Luftwaffe communications during the siege of Malta - and Clara Milburn, whose son was captured after Dunkirk, is waiting, and waiting ...

We tend to see the Second World War as a man's war, featuring Spitfire crews and brave deeds on the Normandy beaches. But in conditions of \"Total War\" millions of women - in the Services and on the Home Front - demonstrated that they were cleverer, more broad-minded and altogether more complex than anyone had ever guessed.

In Millions Like Us Virginia Nicholson tells the story of the women's war, through a host of individual women's experiences. She tells how they loved, suffered, laughed, grieved and dared; how they re-made their world in peacetime. And how they would never be the same again ...

  • Published: 15 March 2012
  • ISBN: 9780670922086
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

About the author

Virginia Nicholson

Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. After studying at Cambridge University she lived in France and Italy and then worked as a documentary researcher for BBC Television. Her first book, Charleston - A Bloomsbury House and Garden (written in collaboration with her father, Quentin Bell), was an account of the Sussex home of her grandmother, the painter Vanessa Bell.
Books published by Penguin include Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 and Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived without Men After the First World War. She is married and has three children.

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Praise for Millions Like Us

Passionate, fascinating, profoundly sympathetic

Artemis Cooper, Evening Standard

A deeply moving account of female courage both at home and overseas during the six brutal years of war...the joy of Virginia Nicholson's book is the way she has plaited scores of individual stories into a richly textured account of the many forms that female courage can take. This story belongs to us all

Kathryn Hughes, The Mail On Sunday

An acclaimed account of this period... a rich seam of social history

Cassandra Jardine, Daily Telegraph

Ambitious, humane and absorbing

Anne Chisholm, Spectator

Where Nicholson scores over other histories and memoirs is that her vivid narrative is set firmly in the context of the social conventions of the time...this lovely book is poignant, hilarious and inspiring

Edwina Currie, The Times