The Women’s Pages

Victoria Purman

From the bestselling author of The Land Girls comes a beautifully realised novel that speaks to the true history and real experiences of post-war women.

Sydney 1945 The war is over, the fight begins.

The war is over and so are the jobs (and freedoms) of tens of thousands of Australian women. The armaments factories are making washing machines instead of bullets and war correspondent Tilly Galloway has hung up her uniform and been forced to work on the women’s pages of her newspaper – the only job available to her – where she struggles to write advice on fashion and make-up.

As Sydney swells with returning servicemen and the city bustles back to post-war life, Tilly finds her world is anything but normal. As she desperately waits for word of her prisoner-of-war husband, she begins to research stories about the lives of the underpaid and overworked women who live in her own city. Those whose war service has been overlooked; the freedom and independence of their war lives lost to them.

Meanwhile Tilly’s waterside worker father is on strike, and her best friend Mary is struggling to cope with the stranger her own husband has become since being liberated from Changi a broken man. As strikes rip the country apart and the news from abroad causes despair, matters build to a heart-rending crescendo. Tilly realises that for her the war may have ended, but the fight is just beginning…

A richly crafted novel that graphically depicts life during those harrowing years. A touching tale and an enthralling read.

- Reader's Digest

A powerful and moving book.

- Canberra Weekly

Release
Sep-2020
ISBN
9781489273987
RRP (AUD)
$32.99
Pages
416
Format
Paperback & ebook

Victoria Purman

Victoria Purman is an Australian top ten and USA Today bestselling fiction author. Her most recent bestseller, The Land Girls, was published in April 2019. The Last of the Bonegilla Girls, a novel based on her mother’s post-war migration to Australia, was published in 2018. Her previous novel The Three Miss Allens became a USA Today bestseller in April 2019. She is a regular guest at writers festivals, a mentor and workshop presenter and was a judge in the fiction category for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.

HarperCollins Australia

HarperCollins Publishing Australia is the second largest trade publishing company in Australia, with a publishing program that spans a broad range of categories across both adult and children’s books, from multi award winning and bestselling authors, both locally and internationally, to cutting edge debut authors. Our company consists of HarperCollins General Books, HarperCollins Children’s Books, ABC Books and Harlequin Australia, and we are the proud home to many of Australia’s biggest names in literature, past and present.