“Is Florence looking after the house all right? I thought it was rather touching of her to say she would like to stay and be bombed with you. Mind you put her underneath when you’re lying down flat in an air-raid.”

Caroline Cameron is charming and witty, no doubt—but also superficial, and a bit immoral. When we first meet her, at the beginning of Ursula Orange’s delightful novel of the early days of World War II, married Caroline is contemplating an affair with an actor. But then war intervenes, and Caroline and her young daughter evacuate to...

Oxford, it appeared, if it did not seem to have fitted her for any precise occupation, had at least unfitted her for a great many things.

In her charming and incisive debut novel, Ursula Orange focuses her sharp eye on four young women only recently down from Oxford.

Jane and Florence live in London, working at office jobs, the latter channelling her excess energy into a dreadfully earnest novel of her own. Sylvia remains at home, shocking her family with theories of sexual and social liberation. And Leslie, as the novel opens, idealizes the other three, as she...