Daisy Styles Books In Order

Publication Order of Wartime Midwives Books

Publication Order of The Bomb Girls Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Daisy Styles is the pseudonym of ghost author, freelance script writer, dramatist, and script editor Di Redmond who has more than a hundred titles to her name. Styles has been active in writing scripts for children’s television, radio, theater, live action TV, and film and is credited for the writing of Postman Pat, Angelina Ballerina, Chuggington, and Bob the Builder among several other animated series. Her work has also transcended children’s literature as she wrote a highly successful play set in Venice and Cambridge titled “Success”. She has also been active at the Edinburgh Festival, where she adapted several classic and collaborated with Roger McGough the poet to make a writing course set in Majorca. Daisy Styles lives in Cambridge and writes “The Artists and Writers Yearbook”, where she is the recognized specialist for ghost-writing and adaptation of the classic for television and theater.

Daisy Styles grew on a huge housing estate in Lancashire that had been put up during the 1930s. During the Second World War in which many of the novels of Styles are set many of the women in Britain were employed in munitions factories. Emily Redmond her mother was a leader among these women and would come home with personal, riveting, scary, and sometimes funny stories about her work. She would describe the intrinsic danger of the work, the turbans and uniforms, the music and the food in the canteen in such intimate detail that it was seared into Styles memory. Together with her sister, she would sit and drink strong tea while her mother told stories that would leave them goggle eyed. They thought their mother a hero and lived their lives putting her on a pedestal for the work she had done. Style sets “The Bomb Girls” series of novels in the Lancashire Moors given that it was almost something of a playground for her. In a recent interview she gave, Styles asserted that the moor setting with its intrinsic remoteness for safety reasons offered the perfect location for her narratives. Moreover, having lived near the area for years, there was no terrain that she knew better than the isolated factory near Bury. She can still vividly remember the sheep path that run through the heather and bracken and the boulders and craggy outlets where the rabbits bounce along. Despite the horrors of the war, it was a time of joy in Lancashire where the residents had magnificent views of the Pennines, the Irish Sea and the majestic hilltops.

“The Bomb Girls” series of novels is set during World War II when the women of Britain were facing monumental changes in their lives that would change their destinies forever. They had to knuckle down and do what had traditionally had been men’s work given that most of the men had gone away to fight the war. Winston Churchill had hit upon the winning idea to incorporate women into the workforce as the Timber Corp, Land Girls and Bomb Girls and kept up production and provision of essential war equipment and services. The women drove buses, lorries and trains, repaired trucks and built planes. Women were employed in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the war office, and in hospitals where they operated radar and radio equipment, delivered mail, drove, and cooked. They joined the Women’s Royal Navy Service and in secret locations such as Bletchley Park, they would decode secret messages and work in Special Operation Missions. With the ending of the war in 1945, things could never be the same again as the women had been empowered by having to work outside the home in nontraditional roles, some of which they had enjoyed. The role of the women in the war and the war in general therefore came to influence women for generations.

“The Bomb Girls” the first novel of “The Bomb Girls” series of novels is set in 1941 where five women of Lancashire receive a letter on their doors that change their entire lives. The women need to report for compulsory work towards the war effort and even if Lilian burns, hides, or tears her letter, there is no getting out of it. Tens of miles away, Emily’s dream of becoming a world-famous chef has to be abandoned at least for the time being as she has to report for duty just when she was to go to college. On the other side of town, Elsie is looking at her own letter and is one the few women happy that finally she can hope to leave behind her cruel father. Down in London, Agnes is also smiling but for very different reasons to those for Elsie. The women come together in a remote Lancashire mill town where they are to start working at a munitions factory. They share new opportunities, lost dreams, joy and find new strength and friendship that is brought about by their work to save a country they love win a war of survival.

“The Bomb Girls’ Secrets” is the second novel of the series that tells the stories of the women of Britain during the war. They tell of the jobs of the women and how they kept Britain running while the men fought on the continent. Kitty has a problematic father and personal commitments in her home in Ireland, but given that the job in the far away bomb factory comes with financial rewards she badly needs, she cannot refuse. It is hard and dangerous work but she finds comfort in her friends Edna, Violet, and Gladys. She harbors all manner of dark secrets, but over time her social life becomes quite enjoyable given the vivacious nature of the women at the factory. As the women become even closer to each other, Kitty comes to trust in her friends and soon learns that most of the women in the group also have their own secrets. Living in the background of the biggest war in history they have to contend with loss, air raids, and danger almost every day. Including all the danger is the romantic entanglements that the women find themselves in. The novels is a heartwarming, entertaining, and light read full of drama, humor, and wit, even if set in troubling times.