Hay Bales and Hollyhocks

Sheila Newberry

A YOUNG girl’s idyllic life in the Cambridge Fenlands is changed forever when her family moves to the  Norfolk countryside, just as the country is about to be plunged into the upheaval of the Second World War, in a heart-warming saga from Sheila Newberry.

Newberry (pictured below), the Suffolk-born author who died in 2020, knew a thing or two about the ups and downs of family life. A mother of nine children, and with twenty-two grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, this much-loved writer left a legacy of nostalgic sagas – including this page-turner previously published as Our Cousin Rosanna – which have enthralled readers across the decades.

In Hay Bales and Hollyhocks, we are transported back to the Fens in 1938 where little Rosanna is part of a close-knit family and the youngest of three cousins. In a time of childhood abandon and with adventures to enjoy on the waterways, life couldn’t be more perfect for her.

But things are not always as they seem and when Rosanna’s new baby brother Russ is born, tragedy strikes the family. To make matters worse, the outbreak of World War Two is just around the corner and when the family moves to the Norfolk countryside, Rosanna is torn from the life she loves. But as she and the other young family members grow up together, she realises that to find happiness, we sometimes have to break away from the things we know.

Full of rich period detail and nostalgia, and written with Newberry’s natural empathy and insight into what it meant to live through times of upheaval and personal challenges, this gently uplifting story is a saga to savour.
(Zaffre, paperback, £9.99)