About the book

It’s 1945, and Corporal Valentine Vere-Thissett, aged 23, is on his way home.

But ‘home’ is Dimperley, built in the 1500s, vast and dilapidated, up to its eaves in debt and half-full of fly-blown taxidermy and dependent relatives, the latter clinging to a way of life that has gone forever.

And worst of all – following the death of his heroic older brother – Valentine is now Sir Valentine, and is responsible for the whole bloody place. To Valentine, it’s a millstone; to Zena Baxter, who has never really had a home before being evacuated there with her small daughter, it’s a place of wonder and sentiment, somewhere that she can’t bear to leave.

But Zena has been living with a secret, and the end of the war means she has to face a reckoning of her own…

What I learned

Lissa Evans’s Small Bomb at Dimperley is a delicious treat of a book. After a run of books I hadn’t quite connected with, this was the perfect, funny, touching story to escape into.

It’s an affecting love story set in a formerly grand house at the end of the second world war. Dimperley is peopled by the eccentric Vere-Thissett family their panoply of taxidermy – along with Zena Baxter, an evacuee with a gift for organisation.

When Sir Valentine Vere-Thissett returns to Dimperley as the reluctant heir, he finds himself contending with a crumbling pile, an upper-class family on its uppers and an unwanted love match.

He is presented as nice but ineffectual, which only brings the strength of Zena into greater focus as the story moves on. But as with many country-house stories, the house itself becomes the main character, attracting and repelling the human characters who try to navigate their post-war lives within its walls.

‘The general public? In here?’ said his mother, aghast, glancing around the Morning Room as if it had suddenly filled with expectorating tramps. ‘We obviously can’t allow that.’

‘But we don’t have a choice, said Valentine. ‘I was shown the figures. The only alternative is to sell the house?’

‘I’m sure that’s an exaggeration. I have, in any case, been meaning to speak to you on this subject.’

‘Which subject?’

“We’d be like the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar, said Alaric. ‘Stared at and goaded by ignorant trippers.’

‘But the alternative is to sell the house?’

Lissa Evans’s gift for prose means I found myself laughing out loud one moment, and incredibly touched the next, with some passages so deliciously written that I found myself going over them several times. Evans’s has a great gift for language, dropping unexpected turns of phrase and words like small humour bombs throughout a book that is begging for a period rom-com film adaptation.