Book Club Meets Maisie Dobbs

Don't forget that Book Club is being held at the home of Marilyn Miles this Wednesday (June 4) at 8pm. We are reading

Maisie Dobbs
Created by Jacqueline Winspear

In her spawling, ambitious eponymously-titled historical novel, MAISIE DOBBS is a young working class girl in World War One-era England with a love of books and learning who originally works as a housemaid for social activist Lady Rowan Compton. Lady Compton takes the young girl under her wing, and rewards her with an education. But World War One interupts everyone's lives, and after a stint as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, Maisie is hired by her Lady's good friend, Maurice Blanche, a rather well-known forensic scientist, philosopher and investigator who runs a private detective agency.

Her debut opens in early 1929, with Maisie just having opened her own Trade and Personal Investigations office in Bloomsbury, but much of the book flashes back to Maise's childhood. Not so much a mystery, then, as the story of a woman and her life and times (although there is a juicy little mystery in it, all about WWI vets and a possible cover-up by the British Army, and Maisie is a appealingly intuitive and compassionate detective), the book is getting all sorts of praise to its piercing and evocative treatment of the Great War and its tragic and sustained aftermath.

Jacqueline Winspear was born and raised in England and later worked in publishing and as a marketing communications consultant in the U.K. before emigrating to the United States. She now lives in California.